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%tjt ^toraitie Literature Series 

DEMOCRACY 

AND OTHER PAPERS 






BY 



JAMES KUSSELL LOWELL 



WITH NOTES 



2nd Copy, 



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CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Democracy .1 

On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners . . 33 
The Study of Modern Languages ... 68 



Note. Mr. Lowell's notes are distinguished from those of the 
editor by the initials, J. R. L. 



4830 



Houghton, Mifflin & Co. are the only authorized publishers 
of the works of Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Emer- 
son. Thoreau, and Hawthorne. All editions which lack the 
imprint or authorization of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. are issued 
without the consent and contrary to the wishes of the authors or 
their heirs. 



Copyright, 1871 and 1886, 
By JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

Copyright, 1891, 
By MABEL LOWELL BURNETT. 

Copyright, 1898, 
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 



All rights reserved. 



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The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton and Company. 



iji 

DEMOCRACY AND OTHER PAPERS. 



DEMOCRACY. 



In 1880 Mr. Lowell was appointed American Minister 
to the Court of St. James, being transferred from Madrid, 
where he had represented the United States for three years. 
Before going to Spain he had held no office, and had served 
his country publicly only as a delegate to the national con- 
vention which nominated Hayes for the presidency, and as 
a presidential elector. The feeling that he was essentially 
a man of letters, and not a diplomat, was wittily expressed 
by the London Spectator, which, on his arrival in that city, 
announced him as " His Excellency the Ambassador of 
American Literature to the Court of Shakespeare." But 
although he lacked practical experience in politics and di- 
plomacy, he had been a keen observer of public affairs, as 
his writings had amply proved ; and his well-trained mind, 
his sound judgment, and his unerring sagacity served him 
in such good stead that his career abroad was perhaps a 
surprise to many who had been inclined to regard him as a 
dilettante in statesmanship. Rarely has our country been 
so ably represented. 

The English were not slow to perceive Mr. Lowell's 
worth, and he was made the recipient of many honors, both 
social and official. He was much in request as a public 
speaker, and gave some notable addresses during his resi- 
dence in England. The most significant of these was De- 
mocracy, which he delivered at Birmingham on assuming 
the presidency of the Birmingham and Midland Institute, 



2 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

October 6, 1884. It was felt at once, on both sides of the 
water, to be a noble confession of political faith. In a let- 
ter to his friend, Charles Eliot Norton, Mr. Lowell says: 
" I send you a copy of my address at B. It has made 
a kind of (mildish) sensation, greatly to my surprise. I 
could n't conceive . . . that I had made so great a splash 
with so small a pebble." 

Some months after the poet's death, George William Cur- 
tis gave an address in his honor before the Brooklyn Insti- 
tute, from which we quote the following passage : — 

" During his official residence in England, Lowell seemed 
to have the fitting word for every occasion, and to speak it 
with memorable distinction. . . . His discourse on demo- 
cracy at Birmingham, in October, 1884, was not only an 
event, but an event without a precedent. He was the min- 
ister of the American republic to the British monarchy, and, 
as that minister, publicly to declare in England the most 
radical democratic principles as the ultimate logical result 
of the British Constitution, and to do it with a temper, 
an urbanity, a moderation, a precision of statement, and a 
courteous grace of humor which charmed doubt into acqui- 
escence and amazement into unfeigned admiration and ac- 
knowledgment of a great service to political thought greatly 
done — this was an event unknown in the annals of diplo- 
macy, and this is what Lowell did at Birmingham. 

" No American orator has made so clear and comprehen- 
sive a declaration of the essential American principle, or so 
simple a statement of its ethical character. Yet not a word 
of this republican to whom Algernon Sydney would have 
bowed, and whom Milton would have blessed, would have 
jarred the Tory nerves of Sir Roger de Coverley, although 
no English radical was ever more radical than he." 

He must be a born leader or misleader of men, or 
must have been sent into the world unfurnished with 
that modulating and restraining balance-wheel which 



DEMOCRACY. 3 

we call a sense of humor, who, in old age, has as strong 
a confidence in his opinions and in the necessity of 
bringing the universe into conformity with them as he 
had in youth. In a world the very condition of whose 
being is that it should be in perpetual flux, where all 
seems mirage, and the one abiding thing is the effort 
to distinguish realities from appearances, the elderly 
man x must be indeed of a singularly tough and valid 
fibre who is certain that he has any clarified residuum 
of experience, any assured verdict of reflection, that 
deserves to be called an opinion, or who, even if he 
had, feels that he is justified in holding mankind by 
the button while he is expounding it. And in a world 
of daily — nay, almost hourly — journalism, where 
every clever man, every man who thinks himself 
clever, or whom anybody else thinks clever, is called 
upon to deliver his judgment point-blank and at the 
word of command on every conceivable subject of 
human thought, or, on what sometimes seems to him 
very much the same thing, on every inconceivable dis- 
play of human want of thought, there is such a spend- 
thrift waste of all those commonplaces which furnish 
the permitted staple of public discourse that there is 
little chance of beguiling a new tune out of the one- 
stringed instrument on which we have been thrum- 
ming so long. In this desperate necessity one is 
often tempted to think that, if all the words of the 
dictionary were tumbled down in a heap and then all 
those fortuitous juxtapositions and combinations that 
made tolerable sense were picked out and pieced to- 
gether, we might find among them some poignant 
suggestions towards novelty of thought or expression. 
But, alas ! it is only the great poets who seem to have 
1 Lowell was in his sixty-sixth year at this time. 



4 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

this unsolicited profusion of unexpected and incalcu- 
lable phrase, this infinite variety of topic. For every- 
body else everything has been said before, and said 
over again after. He who has read his Aristotle will 
be apt to think that observation has on most points 
of general applicability said its last word, and he who 
has mounted the tower of Plato to look abroad from 
it will never hope to climb another with so lofty a 
vantage of speculation. Where it is so simple if not 
so easy a thing to hold one's peace, why add to the 
general confusion of tongues ? There is something 
disheartening, too, in being expected to fill up not 
less than a certain measure of time, as if the mind 
were an hour-glass, that need only be shaken and set 
on one end or the other, as the case may be, to run 
its allotted sixty minutes with decorous exactitude. I 
recollect being once told by the late eminent natural- 
ist, Agassiz, that when he was to deliver his first lec- 
ture as professor (at Zurich, I believe) he had grave 
doubts of his ability to occupy the prescribed three 
quarters of an hour. He was speaking without notes, 
and glancing anxiously from time to time at the 
watch that lay before him on the desk. " When I 
had spoken a half hour," he said, " I had told them 
everything I knew in the world, everything! Then 
I began to repeat myself," he added, roguishly, " and 
I have done nothing else ever since." Beneath the 
humorous exaggeration of the story I seemed to see 
the face of a very serious and improving moral. And 
yet if one were to say only what he had to say and 
then stopped, his audience would feel defrauded of 
their honest measure. Let us take courage by the ex- 
ample of the French, whose exportation of Bordeaux 
wines increases as the area of their land in vineyards 
is diminished. 



DEMOCRACY. 5 

To me, somewhat hopelessly revolving these things, 
the undelayable year has rolled round, and I find my- 
self called upon to say something in this place, where 
so many wiser men have spoken before me. Pre- 
cluded, in my quality of national guest, by motives of 
taste and discretion, from dealing with any question 
of immediate and domestic concern, it seemed to me 
wisest, or at any rate most prudent, to choose a topic 
of comparatively abstract interest, and to ask your 
indulgence for a few somewhat generalized remarks 
on a matter concerning which I had some experi- 
mental knowledge, derived from the use of such eyes 
and ears as Nature had been pleased to endow me 
withal, and such report as I had been able to win 
from them. The subject which most readily sug- 
gested itself was the spirit and the working of those 
conceptions of life and polity which are lumped 
together, whether for reproach or commendation, 
under the name of Democracy. By temperament 
and education of a conservative turn, I saw the last 
years of that quaint Arcadia which French travellers 
saw with delighted amazement a century ago, and 
have watched the change (to me a sad one) from an 
agricultural to a proletary population. 1 The testi- 

1 The participation of Frenchmen in the American Revolu- 
tionary War naturally led to considerable intercourse between 
the United States and France, and with the oncoming of the 
Revolution in the latter country interest there became especially 
keen as to the success of the new republic across the Atlantic. 
For these and other reasons, many French travellers visited our 
shores in the last part of the eighteenth and the first part of the 
nineteenth centuries, and owing to the political unrest at home, 
they were quite generally predisposed to favorable views of our 
institutions. 

Brissot de Warville, who travelled in the United States in 1788, 
says, in the preface to the book which he published in 1791 : 



6 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

mony of Balaam 1 should carry some conviction. I 
have grown to manhood and am now growing old with 

the growth of this system of government in my native 
land; have watched its advances, or what some would 
call its encroachments, gradual and irresistible as those 
of a glacier : have been an ear-witness to the fore- 
bodings of wise and good and timid men. and have 
lived to see those forebodings belied by the course of 
events, which is apt to show itself humorously care- 
less of the reputation of prophets. I recollect hearing 
a sagacious old gentleman sav in 1840 that the doincr 
away with the property qualification for suffrage twenty 
years before had been the ruin of the State of Massa- 
chusetts : that it had put public credit and private 
estate alike at the mercy of demagogues. I lived to 
see that Commonwealth twenty odd years later rjaying 
the interest on her bonds in gold, though it cost her 
sometimes nearly three for one to keep her faith, and 
that while suffering an unparalleled drain of men and 
treasure in helping to sustain the unity and self- 
respect of the nation. 

If universal suffrage has worked ill in our larger 
cities, as it certainly has. this has been mainly because 
the hands that wielded it were untrained to its use. 
There the election of a majority of the trustees of the 

■• I? it not evident that private morals associate naturally with a 
rural life ? . . . The reason why the Americans possess such 
pure morals is because nine tenths of them live dispersed in 
the country. ... Frenchmen ! Study the Americans of the 
present clay. Open this book : you will here see to what degree 
of prosperity the blessings of freedom can elevate the industry 
of man.'' 

1 That is. the testimony of one whose message is not what his 
hearers would most gladly receive, but who speaks the truth as 
it has been shown to him. See Numbers xxii-rsiv. 



DEMOCRACY. 7 

public money is controlled by the most ignorant and 
vicious of a population which has come to us from 
abroad, wholly unpracticed in self-government and in- 
capable of assimilation by American habits and meth- 
ods. But the finances of our towns, where the native 
tradition is still dominant and whose affairs are dis- 
cussed and settled in a public assembly of the people, 
have been in general honestly and prudently adminis- 
tered. Even in manufacturing towns, where a major- 
ity of the voters live by their daily wages, it is not 
so often the recklessness as the moderation of public 
expenditure that surprises an old-fashioned observer. 
" The beggar is in the saddle at last," cries Proverbial 
Wisdom. 1 " Why, in the name of all former experi- 
ence, does n't he ride to the Devil? " Because in the 
very act of mounting he ceased to be a beggar and 
became pai-t owner of the piece of property he be- 
strides. The last thing we need be anxious about is 
property. It always has friends or the means of mak- 
ing them. If riches have wings to fly away from their 
owner, they have wings also to escape danger. 

I hear America sometimes playfully accused of send- 
ing you all your storms, and am in the habit of parry- 
ing the charge by alleging that we are enabled to do 
this because, in virtue of our protective system, we 
can afford to make better bad weather than anybody 
else. And what wiser use could we make of it than 
to export it in return for the paupers which some 
European countries are good enough to send over to 
us who have not attained to the same skill in the man- 
ufacture of them ? But bad weather is not the worst 
thing that is laid at our door. A French gentleman, 
not long ago, forgetting Burke's monition of how un- 
1 " Beggars mounted run their horses to death.'* — Old Proverb. 



8 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

wise it is to draw an indictment against a whole peo- 
ple, 1 has charged us with the responsibility of whatever 
he finds disagreeable in the morals or manners of his 
countrymen. If M. Zola or some other competent 
witness would only go into the box and tell us what 
those morals and manners were before our example 
corrupted them ! But I confess that I find little to 
interest and less to edify rue in these international 
bandy ings of " You 're another." 

I shall address myself to a single point only in the 
long list of offences of which we are more or less 
gravely accused, because that really includes all the 
rest. It is that we are infecting the Old World with 
what seems to be thought the entirely new disease of 
Democracy. It is generally people who are in what 
are called easy circumstances who can afford the lei- 
sure to treat themselves to a handsome complaint, and 
these experience an immediate alleviation when once 
they have found a sonorous Greek name to abuse it 
by. There is something consolatory also, something 
flattering to their sense of personal dignity, and to 
that conceit of singularity which is the natural recoil 
from our uneasy consciousness of being commonplace, 
in thinking ourselves victims of a malady by which 
no one had ever suffered before. Accordingly they 
find it simpler to class under one comprehensive head- 
ing whatever they find offensive to their nerves, their 
tastes, their interests, or what they suppose to be their 
opinions, and christen it Democracy, much as physi- 
cians label every obscure disease gout, or as cross- 
grained fellows lay their ill-temper to the weather. 

1 In his speech on moving his resolution for conciliation with 
the American Colonies, in the House of Commons, March 22, 
1775. See Riverside Literature Series, No. 100, p. 36. 



* DEMOCRACY. 9 

But is it really a new ailment, and, if it be, is America 
answerable for it? Even if she were, would it ac- 
count for the phylloxera, and hoof-and-mouth disease, 
and bad harvests, and bad English, and the German 
bands, and the Boers, 1 and all the other discomforts 
with which these later days have vexed the souls of 
them that go in chariots ? Yet I have seen the evil 
example of Democracy in America cited as the source 
and origin of things quite as heterogeneous and quite 
as little connected with it by any sequence of cause 
and effect. Surely this ferment is nothing new. It 
has been at work for centuries, and we are more con- 
scious of it only because in this age of publicity, where 
the newspapers offer a rostrum to whoever has a griev- 
ance, or fancies that he has, the bubbles and scum 
thrown up by it are more noticeable on the surface 
than in those dumb ages when there was a cover of 
silence and suppression on the cauldron. Bernardo 
Navagero, speaking of the Provinces of Lower Austria 
in 1546, tells us that " in them there are five sorts of 
persons, Clergy, Barons, Nobles, Burghers, and Peas- 
ants. Of these last no account is made, because they 
have no voice in the Diet." 2 

Nor was it among the people that subversive or 

1 A reference to the unsuccessful attempt of the English in 
1880 to reduce the Boers of the Transvaal to submission. 

2 Below the Peasants, it should be remembered, was still an- 
other even more helpless class, the servile farm-laborers. The 
same witness informs us that of the extraordinary imposts the 
Peasants paid nearly twice as much in proportion to their esti- 
mated property as the Barons, Nobles, and Burghers together. 
Moreover, the upper classes were assessed at their own valua- 
tion, while they arbitrarily fixed that of the Peasants, who had no 
voice. (Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti, Serie I., tomo i.,pp. 
378, 379, 389.) — J. R. R. 



10 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

mistaken doctrines had their rise. A Father of the 
Church 1 said that property was theft many centuries 
before Proudhon was born. 2 Bourdaloue reaffirmed 
it. Montesquieu was the inventor of national work- 
shops, and of the theory that the State owed every 
man a living. Nay, was not the Church herself the 
first organized Democracy ? A few centuries ago the 
chief end of man was to keep his soul alive, and then 
the little kernel of leaven that sets the gases at work 
was religious, and produced the Reformation. Even 
in that, far-sighted persons like the Emperor Charles 
V. saw the germ of political and social revolution. 
Now that the chief end of man seems to have become 
the keeping of the body alive, and as comfortably 
alive as possible, the leaven also has become wholly 
political and social. But there had also been social 
upheavals before the Reformation and contemporane- 
ously with it, especially among men of Teutonic race. 
The Reformation gave outlet and direction to an un- 
rest already existing. Formerly the immense majority 
of men — our brothers — knew only their sufferings, 
their wants, and their desires. They are beginning 
now to know their opportunity and their power. All 
persons who see deeper than their plates are rather 
inclined to thank God for it than to bewail it, for the 

1 St. Ambrose said : " For nature has given all things to all 
men in common ; for God has ordained that all things shall be 
so produced that food shall be common to all, and the earth as 
it were the common possession of all. Nature therefore is the 
mother of common right, usurpation of private." 

2 Pierre Joseph Proudhon, a French publicist and a specu- 
lator on social and political subjects, published in 1840 his first 
book, " Qu'est-ce que la Proprie'te' ? " And his own answer was, 
" La proprie'te' c'est le vol." (What is property ? Property is 
theft.) 



DEMOCRACY. 11 

sores of Lazarus have a poison in them against which 
Dives has no antidote. 

There can be no doubt that the spectacle of a great 
and prosperous Democracy on the other side of the 
Atlantic must react powerfully on the aspirations and 
political theories of men in the Old World who do 
not find things to their mind ; but, whether for good 
or evil, it should not be overlooked that the acorn . 
from which it sprang was ripened on the British oak. 
Every successive swarm that has gone out from this 
officina gentium 1 has, when left to its own instincts — 
may I not call them hereditary instincts ? — assumed 
a more or less thoroughly democratic form. This 
would seem to show, what I believe to be the fact, that 
the British Constitution, under whatever disguises of 
prudence or decorum, is essentially democratic. Eng- 
land, indeed, may be called a monarchy with demo- 
cratic tendencies, the United States a democracy with 
conservative instincts. People are continually saying 
that America is in the air, and I am glad to think it 
is, since this means only that a clearer conception of 
human claims and human duties is beginning to be 
prevalent. The discontent with the existing order of 
things, however, pervaded the atmosphere wherever 
the conditions were favorable, long before Columbus, 
seeking the back door of Asia, found himself knock- 
ing at the front door of America. I say wherever the 
conditions were favorable, for it is certain that the 
germs of disease do not stick or find a prosperous 
field for their development and noxious activity unless 
where the simplest sanitary precautions have been 
neglected. " For this effect defective comes by cause," 
as Polonius said long ago. 2 It is only by instigation 
1 Workshop of the world. 2 See Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2. 



12 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

of the wrongs of men that what are called the Rights 
of Man become turbulent and dangerous. It is then 
only that they syllogize unwelcome truths. It is not 
the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but 
the revolts of intelligence : — 

" The wicked and the weak rebel in vain, 
Slaves by their own compulsion." 

Had the governing classes in France during the last 
century paid as much heed to their proper business 
as to their pleasures or manners, the guillotine need 
never have severed that spinal marrow of orderly and 
secular tradition through which in a normally consti- 
tuted state the brain sympathizes with the extremities 
and sends will and impulsion thither. It is only when 
the reasonable and practicable are denied that men 
demand the unreasonable and impracticable ; only 
when the possible is made difficult that they fancy 
the impossible to be easy. Fairy tales are made out 
of the dreams of the poor. No ; the sentiment which 
lies at the root of democracy is nothing new. I am 
speaking always of a sentiment, a spirit, and not of a 
form of government ; for this was but the outgrowth 
of the other and not its cause. This sentiment is 
merely an expression of the natural wish of people 
to have a hand, if need be a controlling hand, in the 
management of their own affairs. What is new is 
that they are more and more gaining that control, 
and learning more and more how to be worthy of it. 
What we used to call the tendency or drift — what 
we are being taught to call more wisely the evolution 
of things — has for some time been setting steadily in 
this direction. There is no good in arguing with the 
inevitable. The only argument available with an east 
wind is to put on your overcoat. And in this case, 



DEMOCRACY. 13 

also, the prudent will prepare themselves to encounter 
what they cannot prevent. Some people advise us to 
put on the brakes, as if the movement of which we 
are conscious were that of a railway train running 
down an incline. But a metaphor is no argument, 
though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one 
home and imbed it in the memory. Our disquiet 
comes of what nurses and other experienced persons 
call growing-pains, and need not seriously alarm us. 
They are what every generation before us — certainly 
every generation since the invention of printing — has 
gone through with more or less good fortune. To the 
door of every generation there comes a knocking, and 
unless the household, like the Thane of Cawdor 1 and 
his wife, have been doing some deed without a name, 
they need not shudder. It turns out at worst to be a 
poor relation who wishes to come in out of the cold. 
The porter always grumbles and is slow to open. 
" Who 's there, in the name of Beelzebub ? " he mut- 
ters. Not a change for the better in our human house- 
keeping has ever taken place that wise and good men 
have not opposed it, — have not prophesied with the 
alderman that the world would wake up to find its 
throat cut in consequence of it. The world, on the 
contrary, wakes up, rubs its eyes, yawns, stretches 
itself, and goes about its business as if nothing had 
happened. Suppression of the slave trade, abolition 
of slavery, trade unions, — at all of these excellent 
people shook their heads despondingly, and murmured 
" Ichabod." 2 But the trade unions are now debat- 
ing instead of conspiring, and we all read their dis- 

1 See Macbeth, Act II., Scene 2. 

2 " And she named the child Ichabod, saying, * The glory is 
departed from Israel.' " 1 Sam. iv. 21. 



14 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

cussions with comfort and hope, sure that they are 
learning the business of citizenship and the difficulties 
of practical legislation. 

One of the most curious of these frenzies of exclu- 
sioD was that against the emancipation of the Jews. 
All share in the government of the world was denied 
for centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most 
tenacious, race that had ever lived in it — the race to 
whom we owed our religion and the purest spiritual 
stimulus and consolation to be found in all literature 
— a race in which ability seems as natural and hered- 
itary as the curve of their noses, and whose blood, 
furtively mingling with the bluest bloods in Europe, 
has quickened them with its own indomitable impul- 
sion. We drove them into a corner, but they had 
their revenge, as the wronged are always sure to have 
it sooner or later. They made their corner the coun- 
ter and banking-house of the world, and thence they 
rule it and us with the ignobler sceptre of finance. 
Your grandfathers mobbed Priestley l only that you 

1 Rev. Dr. Joseph Priestley, an English Dissenting minister 
who was also a scientist of repute, noted as the discoverer of 
oxygen. At the time of the French Revolution he was settled 
in Birmingham, where he became so unpopular on account of his 
theological and political doctrines that his church and dwelling- 
house were destroyed by a mob. He tells the story with much 
calmness in his Memoirs : — 

" On occasion of the celebration of the French Revolution on 
July 14, 1791, by several of my friends, but with which I had 
little to do, a mob, encouraged by some persons in power, first 
burned the meeting-house in which I preached, then another 
meeting-house in the town, and then my dwelling-house, demol- 
ishing my library, apparatus, and, as far as they could, every- 
thing belonging to me. They also burned, or much damaged, 
the houses of many Dissenters, chiefly my friends. . . . Being 
in some personal danger on this occasion, I went to London ; 



DEMOCRACY. 15 

might set up his statue and make Birmingham the 
headquarters of English Unitarianism. We hear it 
said sometimes that this is an age of transition, as if 
that made matters clearer ; but can any one point us 
to an age that was not? If he could, he would show 
us an age of stagnation. The question for us, as it 
has been for all before us, is to make the transition 
gradual and easy, to see that our points are right so 
that the train may not come to grief. For we should 
remember that nothing is more natural for people 
whose education has been neglected than to spell evo- 
lution with an initial " r." A great man struggling 
with the storms of fate has been called a sublime 
spectacle ; but surely a great man wrestling with these 
new forces that have come into the world, mastering 
them and controlling them to beneficent ends, would 
be a yet sublimer. Here is not a danger, and if there 
were it would be only a better school of manhood, a 
nobler scope for ambition. I have hinted that what 
people are afraid of in democracy is less the thing 
itself than what they conceive to be its necessary ad- 
juncts and consequences. It is supposed to reduce 
all mankind to a dead level of mediocrity in charac- 
ter and culture, to vulgarize men's conceptions of life, 
and therefore their code of morals, manners, and con- 
duct — to endanger the rights of property and pos- 
session. But I believe that the real gravamen of the 
charges lies in the habit it has of making itself gener- 
ally disagreeable by asking the Powers that Be at 
the most inconvenient moment whether they are the 

and so violent was the spirit of party which then prevailed that 
I believe I could hardly have been safe in any other place." 

Dr. Priestley spent the last years of his life in the United 
States, at Northumberland, Pa., on the Susquehanna River. 



16 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

powers that ought to be. If the powers that be are 
in a condition to give a satisfactory answer to this in- 
evitable question, they need feel in no way discomfited 
by it. 

Few people take the trouble of trying to find out 
what democracy really is. Yet this would be a great 
help, for it is our lawless and uncertain thoughts, it 
is the indefiniteness of our impressions, that fill dark- 
ness, whether mental or physical, with spectres aud 
hobgoblins. Democracy is nothing more than an ex- 
periment in government, more likely to succeed in a 
new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must 
stand or fall on its own merits as others have done 
before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion 
in politics any more than in mechanics. President 
Lincoln defined democracy to be " the government of 
the people by the people for the people." This is a 
sufficiently compact statement of it as a political ar- 
rangement. Theodore Parker said that " Democracy 
meant not ' I 'm as good as you are,' but ' You 're as 
good as I am.' ' ! And this is the ethical conception 
of it, necessary as a complement of the other ; a con- 
ception which, could it be made actual and practical, 
would easily solve all the riddles that the old sphinx 
of political and social economy who sits by the road- 
side has been proposing to mankind from the begin- 
ning, and which mankind have shown such a singular 
talent for answering wrongly. In this sense Christ 
was the first true democrat that ever breathed, as 
the old dramatist Dekker said he was the first true 
gentleman. The characters may be easily doubled, 
so strong is the likeness between them. A beautiful 
and profound parable of the Persian poet Jellaladeen 1 

1 Jelal-ed-din, Mohammed er-Riimi, a famous Persian poet of 



DEMOCRACY. 17 

tells us that " One knocked at the Beloved's door, and 
a voice asked from within ' Who is there ? ' and he 
answered 4 It is I.' Then the voice said, ' This house 
will not hold me and thee ; ' and the door was not 
opened. Then went the lover into the desert and 
fasted and prayed in solitude, and after a year he re- 
turned and knocked again at the door ; and again the 
voice asked 4 Who is there ? ' and he said ■ It is thy- 
self ; ' and the door was opened to him." But that is 
idealism, you will say, and this is an only too practi- 
cal world. I grant it ; but I am one of those who 
believe that the real will never find an irremovable 
basis till it rests on the ideal. It used to be thought 
that a democracy was possible only in a small terri- 
tory, and this is doubtless true of a democracy strictly 
denned, for in such all the citizens decide directly 
upon every question of public concern in a general 
assembly. An example still survives in the tiny Swiss 
canton of Appenzell. But this immediate interven- 
tion of the people in their own affairs is not of the 
essence of democracy ; it is not necessary, nor indeed, 
in most cases, practicable. Democracies to which Mr. 
Lincoln's definition would fairly enough apply have 
existed, and now exist, in which, though the supreme 
authority reside in the people, yet they can act only 
indirectly on the national policy. This generation has 
seen a democracy with an imperial figurehead, and in 
all that have ever existed the body politic has never 
embraced all the inhabitants included within its terri- 
tory : the right to share in the direction of affairs has 
been confined to citizens, and citizenship has been 
further restricted by various limitations, sometimes of 

the thirteenth century, who was at the head of a college of mys- 
tic theology. 



18 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

property, sometimes of nativity, and always of age and 
sex. 

The framers of the American Constitution were far 
from wishing or intending to found a democracy in 
the strict sense of the word, though, as was inevitable, 
every expansion of the scheme of government they 
elaborated has been in a democratical direction. But 
this has been generally the slow result of growth, and 
not the sudden innovation of theory ; in fact, they had 
a profound disbelief in theory, and knew better than 
to commit the folly of breaking with the past. They 
were not seduced by the French fallacy that a new 
system of government could be ordered like a new suit 
of clothes. 1 They would as soon have thought of or- 
dering a new suit of flesh and skin. It is only on the 
roaring loom of time that the stuff is woven for such 
a vesture of their thought and experience as they were 
meditating. They recognized fully the value of tra- 
dition and habit as the great allies of permanence and 
stability. They all had that distaste for innovation 
which belonged to their race, and many of them a 
distrust of human nature derived from their creed. 
The day of sentiment was over, and no dithyrambic 
affirmations or fine-drawn analyses of the Rights of 
Man would serve their present turn. This was a 
practical question, and they addressed themselves to 
it as men of knowledge and judgment should. Their 
problem was how to adapt English principles and 
precedents to the new conditions of American life, 
and they solved it with singular discretion. They put 
as many obstacles as they could contrive, not in the 

1 No other nation of importance has ever made such frequent 
changes in its form of government as has France since the first 
Revolution. 



DEMOCRACY. 19 

way of the people's will, but of their whim. With 
few exceptions they probably admitted the logic of 
the then accepted syllogism, — democracy, anarchy, 
despotism. But this formula was framed upon the 
experience of small cities shut up to stew within their 
narrow walls, where the number of citizens made but 
an inconsiderable fraction of the inhabitants, where 
every passion was reverberated from house to house 
and from man to man with gathering rumor till every 
impulse became gregarious and therefore inconsider- 
ate, and every popular assembly needed but an infu- 
sion of eloquent sophistry to turn it into a mob, all 
the more dangerous because sanctified with the for- 
mality of law. 1 

Fortunately their case was wholly different. They 
were to legislate for a widely scattered population and 
for States already practised in the discipline of a par- 
tial independence. They had an unequalled oppor- 
tunity and enormous advantages. The material they 
had to work upon was already democratical by instinct 
and habitude. It was tempered to their hands by 
more than a century's schooling in self-government, 
They had but to give permanent and conservative 
form to a ductile mass. In giving impulse and direc- 
tion to their new institutions, especially in supply- 
ing them with checks and balances, they had a great 
help and safeguard in their federal organization. The 
different, sometimes conflicting, interests and social 
systems of the several States made existence as a 
Union and coalescence into a nation conditional on 

1 The effect of the electric telegraph in reproducing this troop- 
ing of emotion and perhaps of opinion is yet to be measured. The 
effect of Darwinism as a disintegrator of humanitarianism is also 
to be reckoned with. — J. R. L. 



20 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

a constant practice of moderation and compromise. 
The very elements of disintegration were the best 
guides in political training. Their children learned 
the lesson of compromise only too well, and it was the 
application of it to a question of fundamental morals 
that cost us our civil war. We learned once for all 
that compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor 
roof ; that it is a temporary expedient, often wise in 
party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesman- 
ship. 

Has not the trial of democracy in America proved, 
on the whole, successful ? If it had not, would the 
Old World be vexed with any fears of its proving 
contagious ? This trial would have been less severe 
could it have been made with a people homogeneous 
in race, language, and traditions, whereas the United 
States have been called on to absorb and assimilate 
enormous masses of foreign population, heterogeneous 
in all these respects, and drawn mainly from that class 
which might fairly say that the world was not their 
friend, nor the world's law. The previous condition 
too often justified the traditional Irishman, who, land- 
ing in New York and asked what his politics were, in- 
quired if there was a Government there, and on being 
told that there was, retorted, " Thin I 'm agin it ! " 
We have taken from Europe the poorest, the most 
ignorant, the most turbulent of her people, and have 
made them over into good citizens, who have added to 
our wealth, and who are ready to die in defence of 
a country and of institutions which they know to be 
worth dying for. The exceptions have been (and 
they are lamentable exceptions) where these hordes 
of ignorance and poverty have coagulated in great 
cities. But the social system is yet to seek which has 



DEMOCRACY. 21 

not to look the same terrible wolf in the eyes. On 
the other hand, at this very moment Irish peasants 
are buying up the worn-out farms of Massachusetts, 
and making them productive again by the same virtues 
of industry and thrift that once made them profitable 
to the English ancestors of the men who are deserting 
them. To have achieved even these prosaic results 
(if you choose to call them so), and that out of mate- 
rials the most discordant, — I might say the most re- 
calcitrant, — argues a certain beneficent virtue in the 
system that could do it, and is not to be accounted for 
by mere luck. Carlyle said scornfully that America 
meant only roast turkey every day for everybody. 
He forgot that States, as Bacon said of wars, go on 
their bellies. As for the security of property, it should 
be tolerably well secured in a country where every 
other man hopes to be rich, even though the only pro- 
perty qualification be the ownership of two hands that 
add to the general wealth. Is it not the best security 
for anything to interest the largest possible number 
of persons in its preservation and the smallest in its 
division ? In point of fact, far-seeing men count the 
increasing power of wealth and its combinations as 
one of the chief dangers with which the institutions 
of the United States are threatened in the not distant 
future. The right of individual property is no doubt 
the very corner-stone of civilization as hitherto under- 
stood, but I am a little impatient of being told that 
property is entitled to exceptional consideration be- 
cause it bears all burdens of the State. It bears those, 
indeed, which can most easily be borne, but poverty 
pays with its person the chief expenses of war, pesti- 
lence, and famine. Wealth should not forget this, 
for poverty is beginning to think of it now and then. 



22 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

Let me not be misunderstood. I see as clearly as any 
man possibly can, and rate as highly, the value of 
wealth, and of hereditary wealth, as the security of re- 
finement, the feeder of all those arts that ennoble and 
beautify life, and as making a country worth living 
in. Many an ancestral hall here in England has been 
a nursery of that culture which has been of example 
and benefit to all. Old gold has a civilizing virtue 
which new gold must grow old to be capable of secret- 
ing. 

I should not think of coming before you to defend 
or to criticise any form of government. All have 
their virtues, all their defects, and all have illustrated 
one period or another in the history of the race, with 
signal services to humanity and culture. There is not 
one that could stand a cynical cross-examination by 
an experienced criminal lawyer, except that of a per- 
fectly wise and perfectly good despot, such as the 
world has never seen, except in that white-haired king 
of Browning's, who 

" Lived long ago 
In the morning- of the world, 
When Earth was nearer Heaven than now." 1 

The English race, if they did not invent government 
by discussion, have at least carried it nearest to per- 
fection in practice. It seems a very safe and reason- 
able contrivance for occupying the attention of the 
country, and is certainly a better way of settling ques- 
tions than by push of pike. Yet, if one should ask 
it why it should not rather be called government by 
gabble, it would have to fumble in its pocket a good 
while before it found the change for a convincing 

1 See Browning's Pippa Passes. These lines occur in one of 
Pippa's songs. 



DEMOCRACY. 23 

reply. As matters stand, too, it is beginning to be 
doubtful whether Parliament and Congress sit at 
Westminster and Washington or in the editors' rooms 
of the leading journals, so thoroughly is everything 
debated before the authorized and responsible debat- 
ers get on their legs. And what shall we say of gov- 
ernment by a majority of voices ? To a person who 
in the last century would have called himself an Im- 
partial Observer, a numerical preponderance seems, 
on the whole, as clumsy a way of arriving at truth as 
could well be devised, but experience has apparently 
shown it to be a convenient arrangement for deter- 
mining what may be expedient or advisable or practi- 
cable at any given moment. Truth, after all, wears a 
different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious 
to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the 
bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that 
whoever looks down in search of her sees his own 
image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that 
he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better- 
looking than he had imagined. 

The arguments against universal suffrage are equally 
unanswerable. " What," we exclaim, " shall Tom, 
Dick, and Harry have as much weight in the scale as 
I ? " Of course, nothing could be more absurd. And 
yet universal suffrage has not been the instrument of 
greater unwisdom than contrivances of a more select 
description. Assemblies could be mentioned composed 
entirely of Masters of Arts and Doctors in Divinity 
which have sometimes shown traces of human passion 
or prejudice in their votes. Have the Serene High- 
nesses and Enlightened Classes carried on the busi- 
ness of Mankind so well, then, that there is no use in 
trying a less costly method ? The democratic theory 



24 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

is that those Constitutions are likely to prove steadi- 
est which have the broadest base, that the right to 
vote makes a safety-valve of every voter, and that the 
best way of teaching a man how to vote is to give him 
the chance of practice. For the question is no longer 
the academic one, " Is it wise to give every man the 
ballot ? " but rather the practical one, " Is it prudent 
to deprive whole classes of it any longer ? " It may 
be conjectured that it is cheaper in the long run to 
lift men up than to hold them down, and that the 
ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than 
a sense of wrong in their heads. At any rate this is 
the dilemma to which the drift of opinion has been 
for some time sweeping us, and in politics a dilemma 
is a more unmanageable thing to hold by the horns 
than a wolf by the ears. It is said that the right of 
suffrage is not valued when it is indiscriminately be- 
stowed, and there may be some truth in this, for I 
have observed that what men prize most is a privi- 
lege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a funeral. 
But is there not danger that it will be valued at more 
than its worth if denied, and that some illegitimate 
way will be sought to make up for the want of it? 
Men who have a voice in public affairs are at once 
affiliated with one or other of the great parties be- 
tween which society is divided, merge their individual 
hopes and opinions in its safer, because more general- 
ized, hopes and opinions, are disciplined by its tactics, 
and acquire, to a certain degree, the orderly qualities 
of an army. They no longer belong to a class, but to 
a body corporate. Of one thing, at least, we may be 
certain, that, under whatever method of helping things 
to go wrong man's wit can contrive, those who have 
the divine right to govern will be found to govern in 



DEMOCRACY. 25 

the end, and that the highest privilege to which the 
majority of mankind can aspire is that of being gov- 
erned by those wiser than they. Universal suffrage 
has in the United States sometimes been made the 
instrument of inconsiderate changes, under the notion 
of reform, and this from a misconception of the true 
meaning of popular government. One of these has 
been the substitution in many of the States of popular 
election for official selection in the choice of judges. 
The same system applied to military officers was the 
source of much evil during our civil war, and, I be- 
lieve, had to be abandoned. But it has been also 
true that on all great questions of national policy a 
reserve of prudence and discretion has been brought 
out at the critical moment to turn the scale in favor 
of a wiser decision. An appeal to the reason of the 
people has never been known to fail in the long run. 
It is, perhaps, true that, by effacing the principle of 
passive obedience, democracy, ill understood, has slack- 
ened the spring of that ductility to discipline which 
is essential to " the unity and married calm of States." 
But I feel assured that experience and necessity will 
cure this evil, as they have shown their power to cure 
others. And under what frame of policy have evils 
ever been remedied till they became intolerable, and 
shook men out of their indolent indifference through 
their fears ? 

We are told that the inevitable result of democracy 
is to sap the foundations of personal independence, to 
weaken the principle of authority, to lessen the respect 
due to eminence, whether in station, virtue, or genius. 
If these things were so, society could not hold to- 
gether. Perhaps the best foreing-Jiouse of robust indi- 
viduality would be where public opinion is inclined to 



26 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

be most overbearing, as lie must be of heroic temper 
who should walk along Piccadilly at the height of the 
season in a soft hat. As for authority, it is one of 
the symptoms of the time that the religious reverence 
for it is declining everywhere, but this is due partly 
to the fact that state-craft is no longer looked upon 
as a mystery, but as a business, and partly to the decay 
of superstition, by which I mean the habit of respect- 
ing what we are told to respect rather than what is 
respectable in itself. There is more rough and tum- 
ble in the American democracy than is altogether 
agreeable to people of sensitive nerves and refined 
habits, and the people take their political duties 
lightly and laughingly, as is, perhaps, neither unnatu- 
ral nor unbecoming in a young giant. Democracies 
can no more jump away from their own shadows than 
the rest of us can. They no doubt sometimes make 
mistakes and pay honor to men who do not deserve it. 
But they do this because they believe them worthy of 
it, and though it be true that the idol is the measure 
of the worshipper, yet the worship has in it the germ 
of a nobler religion. But is it democracies alone that 
fall into these errors ? I, who have seen it proposed 
to erect a statue to Hudson, the railway king, 1 and 
have heard Louis Napoleon hailed as the saviour of 
society by men who certainly had no democratic asso- 
ciations or leanings, am not ready to think so. But 
democracies have likewise their finer instincts. I have 

1 George Hudson, an English railway director and speculator, 
who was for a time immensely successful in his schemes. At 
the height of his prosperity a statue to him was proposed, and 
£25,000 were subscribed for it. But before the money could be 
collected he had been exposed as dishonorable in his business 
affairs, and his fall was more rapid than his rise. 



DEMOCRACY. 27 

also seen the wisest statesman and most pregnant 
speaker of onr generation, a man of humble birth and 
ungainly manners, of little culture beyond what his 
own genius supplied, become more absolute in power 
than any monarch of modern times through the rever- 
ence of his countrymen for his honesty, his wisdom, 
his sincerity, his faith in God and man, and the nobly 
humane simplicity of his character. And I remem- 
ber another whom popular respect enveloped as with 
a halo, the least vulgar of men, the most austerely 
genial, and the most independent of opinion. Wher- 
ever he went he never met a stranger, but everywhere 
neighbors and friends proud of him as their ornament 
and decoration. Institutions which could bear and 
breed such men as Lincoln and Emerson had surely 
some energy for good. No, amid all the fruitless 
turmoil and miscarriage of the world, if there be one 
thing steadfast and of favorable omen, one thing to 
make optimism distrust its own obscure distrust, it is 
the rooted instinct in men to admire what is better 
and more beautiful than themselves. The touchstone 
of political and social institutions is their ability to 
supply them with worthy objects of this sentiment, 
which is the very tap-root of civilization and progress. 
There would seem to be no readier way of feeding it 
with the elements of growth and vigor than such an 
organization of society as will enable men to respect 
themselves, and so to justify them in respecting others. 
Such a result is quite possible under other condi- 
tions than those of an avowedly democratical Consti- 
tution. For I take it that the real essence of demo- 
cracy was fairly enough defined by the First Napoleon 
when he said that the French Revolution meant " la 
carriere ouverte aux talents " — a clear pathway for 



28 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

merit of whatever kind. I should be inclined to para- 
phrase this by calling democracy that form of society, 
no matter what its political classification, in which 
every man had a chance and knew that he had it. If 
a man can climb, and feels himself encouraged to 
climb, from a coalpit to the highest position for which 
he is fitted, he can well afford to be indifferent what 
name is given to the government under which he lives. 
The Bailli 1 of Mirabeau, uncle of the more famous 
tribune of that name, wrote in 1771 : " The English 
are, in my opinion, a hundred times more agitated 
and more unfortunate than the very Algerines them- 
selves, because they do not know and will not know 
till the destruction of their over-swollen power, which 
I believe very near, whether they are monarchy, aris- 
tocracy, or democracy, and wish to play the part of 
all three." England has not been obliging enough to 
fulfil the Bailli's prophecy, and perhaps it was this 
very carelessness about the name, and concern about 
the substance of popular government, this skill in get- 
ting the best out of things as they are, in utilizing all 
the motives which influence men, and in giving one 
direction to many impulses, that has been a principal 
factor of her greatness and power. Perhaps it is for- 
tunate to have an unwritten Constitution, for men are 
prone to be tinkering the work of their own hands, 
whereas they are more willing to let time and circum- 
stance mend or modify what time and circumstance 
have made. All free governments, whatever their 
name, are in reality governments by public opinion, 
and it is on the quality of this public opinion that 

1 Jean Antoine Mirabeau, Bailli, or Bailiff. The founder of 
the family of Mirabeau was Honore* Riquete, who bought the 
estate of Mirabeau, whence the name. 



DEMOCRACY. 29 

their prosperity depends. It is, therefore, their first 
duty to purify the element from which they draw the 
breath of life. With the growth of democracy grows 
also the fear, if not the danger, that this atmosphere 
may be corrupted with poisonous exhalations from 
lower and more malarious levels, and the question of 
sanitation becomes more instant and pressing. De- 
mocracy in its best sense is merely the letting in of 
light and air. Lord Sherbrooke, with his usual epi- 
grammatic terseness, bids you educate your future 
rulers. 1 But would this alone be a sufficient safe- 
guard? To educate the intelligence is to enlarge the 
horizon of its desires and wants. And it is well that 
this should be so. But the enterprise must go deeper 
and prepare the way for satisfying those desires and 
wants in so far as they are legitimate. What is really 
ominous of danger to the existing order of things is 
not democracy (which, properly understood, is a con- 
servative force), but the Socialism which may find a 
fulcrum in it. If we cannot equalize conditions and 
fortunes any more than we can equalize the brains 
of men — and a very sagacious person has said that 
" where two men ride of a horse one must ride be- 

1 Kobert Lowe, Viscount Sherbrooke, (1811-1892). An Eng- 
lish politician who opposed the movements for the extension of 
suffrage. In an address on education, delivered in 1867, he 
said : — 

" We are all aware that the Government of the country, the 
voice potential in the Government, is placed in the hands of per- 
sons in a lower position of life than has hitherto been the case. 
... I am most anxious to educate the lower classes of this coun- 
try, in order to qualify them for the power that has passed, and 
perhaps will pass in a still greater degree, into their hands. . . . 
The lower classes ought to be educated to discharge the duties 
cast upon them." 



30 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

hind " — we can yet, perhaps, do something to correct 
those methods and influences that lead to enormous 
inequalities, and to prevent their growing more enor- 
mous. It is all very well to pooh-pooh Mr. George 1 
and to prove him mistaken in his political economy. 
I do not believe that land should be divided because 
the quantity of it is limited by nature. Of what may 
this not be said ? A fortiori, we might on the same 
principle insist on a division of human wit, for I have 
observed that the quantity of this has been even more 
inconveniently limited. Mr. George himself has an 
inequitably large share of it. But he is right in his 
impelling motive ; right, also, I am convinced, in in- 
sisting that humanity makes a part, by far the most 
important part, of political economy ; and in thinking 
man to be of more concern and more convincing 
than the longest columns of figures in the world. For 
unless you include human nature in your addition, 
your total is sure to be wrong and your deductions 
from it fallacious. Communism means barbarism, but 
Socialism means, or wishes to mean, cooperation and 
community of interests, sympathy, the giving to the 
hands not so large a share as to the brains, but a 
larger share than hitherto in the wealth they must 
combine to produce — means, in short, the practical 
application of Christianity to life, and has in it the 
secret of an orderly and benign reconstruction. State 
Socialism would cut off the very roots in personal 
character — self - help, forethought, and frugality — 
which nourish and sustain the trunk and branches of 
every vigorous Commonwealth. 

I do not believe in violent changes, nor do I expect 
them. Things in possession have a very firm grip. 
1 Henry George (1839-1897), author of Progress and Poverty. 



DEMOCRACY. 31 

One of the strongest cements of society is the convic- 
tion of mankind that the state of things into which 
they are born is a part of the order of the universe, 
as natural, let us say, as that the sun should go round 
the earth. It is a conviction that they will not sur- 
render except on compulsion, and a wise society should 
look to it that this compulsion be not put upon them. 
For the individual man there is no radical cure, out- 
side of human nature itself, for the evils to which 
human nature is heir. The rule will always hold good 
that you must 

" Be your own palace or the world 's your gaol." 

But for artificial evils, for evils that spring from want 
of thought, thought must find a remedy somewhere. 
There has been no period of time in which wealth has 
been more sensible of its duties than now. It builds 
hospitals, it establishes missions among the poor, it 
endows schools. It is one of the advantages of ac- 
cumulated wealth, and of the leisure it renders possi- 
ble, that people have time to think of the wants and 
sorrows of their fellows. But all these remedies are 
partial and palliative merely. It is as if we should 
apply plasters to a single pustule of the small -pox 
with a view of driving out the disease. The true way 
is to discover and to extirpate the germs. As society 
is now constituted these are in the air it breathes, in 
the water it drinks, in things that seem, and which 
it has always believed, to be the most innocent and 
healthful. The evil elements it neglects corrupt these 
in their springs and pollute them in their courses. 
Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that 
the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never 
come. The world has outlived much, and will outlive 
a great deal more, and men have contrived to be happy 



32 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

in it. It has shown the strength of its constitution in 
nothing more than in surviving the quack medicines 
it has tried. In the scales of the destinies brawn will 
never weigh so much as brain. Our healing is not in 
the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not in monarchies, 
or aristocracies, or democracies, but will be revealed 
by the still small voice that speaks to the conscience 
and the heart, prompting us to a wider and wiser hu- 
manity. 



ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN 
FOREIGNERS. 1 

Walking one. day toward the Village, 2 as we used 
to call it in the good old days, when almost every 
dweller in the town had been born in it, I was enjoy- 
ing that delicious sense of disenthralment from the 
actual which the deepening twilight brings with it, 
giving as it does a sort of obscure novelty to things 
familiar. The coolness, the hush, broken only by the 
distant bleat of some belated goat, querulous to be 
disburthened of her milky load, the few faint stars, 
more guessed as yet than seen, the sense that the com- 
ing dark would so soon fold me in the secure privacy 
of its disguise, — all things combined in a result as 
near absolute peace as can be hoped for by a man who 
knows that there is a writ out against him in the 
hands of the printer's devil. For the moment, I was 
enjoying the blessed privilege of thinking without 
being called on to stand and deliver what I thought 
to the small public who are good enough to take any 
interest therein. I love old ways, and the path I was 
walking felt kindly to the feet it had known for al- 

1 " A specimen of pure irony, keen as a Damascus blade, and 
finished to the utmost. It is doubtful if there is another essay 
in modern English superior in power, wit, and adroitness." — 
F. H. Underwood. 

2 Elmwood is situated more than a mile from Harvard Square 
in Cambridge, on the way toward Watertown. In the earlier 
part of Lowell's life it was quite in the country, and one might 
naturally speak of walking to the " Village " of Cambridge. 



34 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

most fifty years. How many fleeting impressions it 
had shared with me ! How many times I had lingered 
to study the shadows of the leaves mezzotinted upon 
the turf that edged it by the moon, of the bare boughs 
etched with a touch beyond Rembrandt by the same 
unconscious artist on the smooth page of snow ! If 
I turned round, through dusky tree -gaps came the 
first twinkle of evening lamps in the dear old home- 
stead. On Corey's hill I could see these tiny pharoses 
of love and home and sweet domestic thoughts flash 
out one by one across the blackening salt-meadow be- 
tween. How much has not kerosene added to the 
cheerfulness of our evening landscape ! A pair of 
night-herons flapped heavily over me toward the hid- 
den river. The war was ended. I might walk town- 
ward without that aching dread of bulletins that had 
darkened the July sunshine and twice made the scar- 
let leaves of October seem stained with blood. I re- 
membered with a pang, half-proud, half-painful, how, 
so many years ago, I had walked over the same path 
and felt round my finger the soft pressure of a little 
hand that was one day to harden with faithful grip of 
sabre. On how many paths, leading to how many 
homes where proud Memory does all she can to fill up 
the fireside gaps with shining shapes, must not men 
be walking in just such pensive mood as I ? Ah, 
young heroes, 1 safe in immortal youth as those of 

1 Lowell lost three nephews, Charles Russell Lowell, James 
Jackson Lowell and William Lowell Putnam, in the Civil War. 
Robert Gould Shaw, who led the assault of Fort Wagner, was a 
brother-in-law of Charles Russell Lowell. In honor of Shaw, 
Memorice Positum was written, the last stanza of which begins, — 
" I write of one, 
While with dim eyes I think of three." 

(Charles Russell Lowell was still living at that time.) 



CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 35 

Homer, you at least carried your ideal hence untar- 
nished ! It is locked for you beyond moth or rust in 
the treasure-chamber of Death. 

Is not a country, I thought, that has had such as 
they in it, that could give such as they a brave joy in 
dying for it, worth something, then ? And as I felt 
more and more the soothing magic of evening's cool 
palm upon my temples, as my fancy came home from 
its revery, and my senses, with reawakened curiosity, 
ran to the front windows again from the viewless 
closet of abstraction, and felt a strange charm in find- 
ing the old tree and shabby fence still there under 
the travesty of falling night, nay, were conscious of an 
unsuspected newness in familiar stars and the fading 
outlines of hills my earliest horizon, I was conscious 
of an immortal soul, and could not but rejoice in the 
unwaning goodliness of the world into which I had 
been born without any merit of my own. I thought 
of dear Henry Vaughan's rainbow, 1 " Still young 
and fine ! " I remembered people who had to go over 
to the Alps to learn what the divine silence of snow 
was, who must run to Italy before they were conscious 
of the miracle wrought every day under their very 
noses by the sunset, who must call upon the Berkshire 
hills to teach them what a painter autumn was, while 
close at hand the Fresh Pond meadows made all 
oriels cheap with hues that showed as if a sunset-cloud 
had been wrecked among their maples. One might 
be worse off than even in America, I thought. 

1 Henry Vaughan, a Welsh poet of the seventeenth century, 
wrote a poem, The Rainbow, which begins, — 

" Still young and fine ! but what is still in view 
We slight as old and soil'd, though fresh and new. 
How bright wert thou when Shem's admiring eye 
Thy burnisht, flaming arch did first descry." 



36 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

There are some things so elastic that even the heavy 
roller of democracy cannot flatten them altogether 
down. The mind can weave itself warmly in the 
cocoon of its own thoughts and dwell a hermit any- 
where. A country without traditions, without en- 
nobling associations, a scramble of parvenus, with a 
horrible consciousness of shoddy running through 
politics, manners, art, literature, nay, religion itself ? 
I confess, it did not seem so to me there in that illimit- 
able quiet, that serene self-possession of nature, where 
Collins might have brooded his " Ode to Evening," 
or where those verses on Solitude in Dodsley's Collec- 
tion, that Hawthorne liked so much, might have been 
composed. Traditions ? Granting that we had none, 
all that is worth having in them is the common 
property of the soul, — an estate in gavelkind for all 
the sons of Adam, — and, moreover, if a man cannot 
stand on his two feet (the prime quality of whoever 
has left any tradition behind him), were it not better 
for him to be honest about it at once, and go down on 
all fours ? And for associations, if one have not the 
wit to make them for himself out of native earth, no 
ready-made ones of other men will avail much. Lex- 
ington is none the worse to me for not being in 
Greece, nor Gettysburg that its name is not Marathon. 
" Blessed old fields," I was just exclaiming to myself, 
like one of Mrs. Radcliffe's heroes, " dear acres, inno- 
cently secure from history, which these eyes first be- 
held, may you be also those to which they shall at last 
slowly darken ! " when I was interrupted by a voice 
which asked me in German whether I was the Herr 
Professor, Doctor, So-and-so ? The " Doctor " was 
by brevet or vaticination, to make the grade easier to 
my pocket. 



CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 37 

One feels so intimately assured that one is made 
up, in part, of shreds and leavings of the past, in part 
of the interpolations of other people, that an honest 
man would be slow in saying yes to such a question. 
But " my name is So-and-so " is a safe answer, and I 
gave it. While I had been romancing with myself, 
the street-lamps had been lighted, and it was under 
one of these detectives that have robbed the Old Road 
of its privilege of sanctuary after nightfall that I was 
ambushed by my foe. The inexorable villain had 
taken my description, it appears, that I might have 
the less chance to escape him. Dr. Holmes tells us 
that we change our substance, not every seven years, 
as was once believed, but with every breath we draw. 
Why had I not the wit to avail myself of the subter- 
fuge, and, like Peter, to renounce my identify, espe- 
cially, as in certain moods of mind, I have often more 
than doubted of it myself? When a man is, as it 
were, his own front-door, and is thus knocked at, why 
may he not assume the right of that sacred wood to 
make every house a castle, by denying himself to all 
visitations ? I was truly not at home when the ques- 
tion was put to me, but had to recall myself from all 
out-of-doors, and to piece my self -consciousness hastily 
together as well as I could before I answered it. 

I knew perfectly well what was coming. It is sel- 
dom that debtors or good Samaritans waylay people 
under gas-lamps in order to force money upon them, 
so far as I have seen or heard. I was also aware, 
from considerable experience, that every foreigner is 
persuaded that, by doing this country the favor of 
coming to it, he has laid every native thereof under 
an obligation, pecuniary or other, as the case may be, 
whose discharge he is entitled to on demand duly 



38 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. . 

made in person or by letter. Too much learning (of 
this kind) had made me mad in the provincial sense 
of the word. I had begun life with the theory of 
giving something to every beggar that came along, 
though sure of never finding a native-born countryman 
among them. In a small way, I was resolved to emu- 
late Hatem Tai's 1 tent, with its three hundred and 
sixty-five entrances, one for every day in the year, — 
I know not whether he was astronomer enough to add 
another for leap-years. The beggars were a kind of 
German-silver aristocracy ; not real plate, to be sure, 
but better than nothing. Where everybody was over- 
worked, they supplied the comfortable equipoise of 
absolute leisure, so aesthetically needful. Besides, I 
was but too conscious of a vagrant fibre in myself, 
which too often thrilled me in my solitary walks with 
the temptation to wander on into infinite space, and 
by a single spasm of resolution to emancipate myself 
from the drudgery of prosaic serfdom to respectabil- 
ity and the regular course of things. This prompting 
has been at times my familiar demon, and I could not 
but feel a kind of respectful sympathy for men who 
had dared what I had only sketched out to myself 
as a splendid possibility. For seven years I helped 
maintain one heroic man on an imaginary journey to 
Portland, — as fine an example as I have ever known 
of hopeless loyalty to an ideal. I assisted another 
so long in a fruitless attempt to reach Mecklenburg- 
Schwerin, that at last we grinned in each other's faces 
when we met, like a couple of augurs. He was pos- 
sessed by this harmless mania as some are by the 
North Pole, and I shall never forget his look of regret- 
ful compassion (as for one who was sacrificing his 
1 Hatem Tai, A character in the Arabian Nights. 



CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 39 

higher life to the fleshpots of Egypt) when I at last 

advised him somewhat strenuously to go to the D — , 

whither the road was so much travelled that he could 
not miss it. General Banks, in his noble zeal for the 
honor of his country, would confer on the Secretary 
of State the power of imprisoning, in case of war, all 
these seekers of the unattainable, thus by a stroke of 
the pen annihilating the single poetic element in our 
humdrum life. Alas ! not everybody has the genius 
to be a Bobbin-Boy, 1 or doubtless all these also would 
have chosen that more prosperous line of life ! But 
moralists, sociologists, political economists, and taxes 
have slowly convinced me that my beggarly sympathies 
were a sin against society. Especially was the Buckle 
doctrine of averages 2 (so flattering to our free-will) 
persuasive with me ; for as there must be in every 
year a certain number who would bestow an alms on 
these abridged editions of the Wandering Jew, the 
withdrawal of my quota could make no possible dif- 
ference, since some destined proxy must always step 
forward to fill my gap. Just so many misdirected 

1 General N. P. Banks was called the " Bobbin-Boy " from 
the fact of his having worked in a cotton factory in his youth. 

2 Thomas Henry Buckle, in his History of Civilization in Eng- 
land, declares that the mental laws which regulate the progress 
of society cannot be discovered by the introspective study of the 
individual, but only by such a comprehensive survey of facts as 
will enable us to eliminate disturbances ; that is, by the method 
of averages. 

"The actions of individuals are greatly affected by their 
moral feelings and passions ; but these, being antagonistic to 
the passions and feelings of other individuals, are balanced by 
them, so that their effect is in the great average of human 
affairs nowhere to be seen, and the total actions of mankind, 
considered as a whole, are left to be regulated by the total 
knowledge of which mankind is possessed." 



40 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

letters every year and no more ! Would it were as 
easy to reckon up the number of men on whose backs 
fate has written the wrong address, so that they arrive 
by mistake in Congress and other places where they 
do not belong ! May not these wanderers of whom 
I speak have been sent into the world without any 
proper address at all ? Where is our Dead-Letter 
Office for such ? And if wiser social arrangements 
should furnish us with something of the sort, fancy 
(horrible thought !) how many a workingman's friend 
(a kind of industry in which the labor is light and the 
wages heavy) would be sent thither because not called 
for in the office where he at present lies ! 

But I am leaving my new acquaintance too long 
under the lamp-post. The same Gano 1 which had 
betrayed me to him revealed to me a well-set young 
man of about half my own age, as well dressed, so 
far as I could see, as I was, and with every natural 
qualification for getting his own livelihood as good, 
if not better, than my own. He had been reduced to 
the painful necessity of calling upon me by a series 
of crosses beginning with the Baden Revolution 2 (for 
which, I own, he seemed rather young, — but perhaps 
he referred to a kind of revolution practised every 

1 Gano, or Ganelon, betrayed the rear-guard of Charlemagne's 
army in the pass of Roncesvalles, and his name has become 
proverbial for a traitor. Mr. Lowell seems here to make a play 
upon words, associating " lamp-post " with the Greek ganao (or 
gano), which means "to shine." 

2 The grand-duchy of Baden did not escape the revolutionary 
impulse which emanated from France in 1848. The Republican 
leaders, Hecker and Struve, stirred up an insurrection, and the 
Grand Duke Leopold fled. A constituent assembly was called 
in May, 1849. But by Prussian help, and after several battles, 
the grand duke was reestablished on his throne. 



CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 41 

season at Baden-Baden), 1 continued by repeated fail- 
ures in business, for amounts which must convince me 
of his entire respectability, and ending with our Civil 
War. During the latter, he had served with distinc- 
tion as a soldier, taking a main part in every impor- 
tant battle, with a rapid list of which he favored me, 
and no doubt would have admitted that, impartial as 
Jonathan Wild's great ancestor, he had been on both 
sides, had I baited him with a few hints of conserva- 
tive opinions on a subject so distressing to a gentleman 
wishing to profit by one's sympathy and unhappily 
doubtful as to which way it might lean. For all these 
reasons, and, as he seemed to imply, for his merit in 
consenting to be born in Germany, he considered him- 
self my natural creditor to the extent of five dollars, 
which he would handsomely consent to accept in green- 
backs, though he preferred specie. The offer was cer- 
tainly a generous one, and the claim presented with an 
assurance that carried conviction. But, unhappily, I 
had been led to remark a curious natural phenomenon. 
If I was ever weak enough to give anything to a peti- 
tioner of whatever nationality, it always rained de- 
cayed compatriots of his for a month after. Post hoc 
ergo propter hoc 2 may not always be safe logic, but 
here I seemed to perceive a natural connection of cause 
and effect. Now, a few days before I had been so 
tickled with a paper (professedly written by a benevo- 
lent American clergyman) certifying that the bearer, 
a hard-working German, had long " sofered with rheu- 
matic paints in his limps," that, after copying the pas- 
sage into my note-book, I thought it but fair to pay a 
trifling honorarium to the author. I had pulled the 

1 Baden-Baden is famed as a gambling- place. 

2 After this, therefore on account of this. 



42 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

string of the shower-bath ! It had been running ship- 
wrecked sailors for some time, but forthwith it began 
to pour Teutons, redolent of lager-bier. I could not 
help associating the apparition of my new friend with 
this series of otherwise unaccountable phenomena. I 
accordingly made up my mind to deny the debt, and 
modestly did so, pleading a native bias towards impe- 
cuniosity to the full as strong as his own. He took 
a high tone with me at once, such as an honest man 
would naturally take with a confessed repudiator. 
He even brought down his proud stomach so far as to 
join himself to me for the rest of my townward walk, 
that he might give me his views of the American peo- 
ple, and thus inclusively of myself. 

I know not whether it is because I am pigeon- 
livered and lack gall, or whether it is from an over- 
mastering sense of drollery, but I am apt to submit 
to such bastings with a patience which afterwards 
surprises me, being not without my share of warmth 
in the blood. Perhaps it is because I so often meet 
with young persons who know vastly more than I do, 
and especially with so many foreigners whose know- 
ledge of this country is superior to my own. However 
it may be, I listened for some time with tolerable com- 
posure as my self-appointed lecturer gave me in detail 
his opinions of my country and its people. America, 
he informed me, was without arts, science, literature, 
culture, or any native hope of supplying them. We 
were a people wholly given to money-getting, and who, 
having got it, knew no other use for it than to hold it 
fast. I am fain to confess that I felt a sensible itch- 
, ing of the biceps, and that my fingers closed with such 
a grip as he had just informed me was one of the 
effects of our unhappy climate. But happening just 



CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 43 

then to be where I could avoid temptation by dodging 
down a by-street, I hastily left him to finish his dia- 
tribe to the lamp-post, which could stand it better 
than I. That young man will never know how near 
he came to being assaulted by a respectable gentleman 
of middle age, at the corner of Church Street. I have 
never felt quite satisfied that I did all my duty by him 
in not knocking him down. But perhaps he might 
have knocked me down, and then ? 

The capacity of indignation makes an essential part 
of the outfit of every honest man, but I am inclined 
to doubt whether he is a wise one who allows himself 
to act upon its first hints. It should be rather, I sus- 
pect, a latent heat in the blood, which makes itself 
felt in character, a steady reserve for the brain, warm- 
ing the ovum of thought to life, rather than cooking 
it by a too hasty enthusiasm in reaching the boiling- 
point. As my pulse gradually fell back to its normal 
beat, I reflected that I had been uncomfortably near 
making a fool of myself, — a handy salve of euphuism 
for our vanity, though it does not always make a just 
allowance to Nature for her share in the business. 
What possible claim had my Teutonic friend to rob 
me of my composure ? I am not, I think, specially 
thin-skinned as to other people's opinions of myself, 
having, as I conceive, later and fuller intelligence on 
that point than anybody else can give me. Life is 
continually weighing us in very sensitive scales, and 
telling every one of us precisely what his real weight 
is to the last grain of dust. Whoever at fifty does 
not rate himself quite as low as most of his acquaint- 
ance would be likely to put him, must be either a fool 
or a great man, and I humbly disclaim being either. 
But if I was not smarting in person from any scat- 



44 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

tering shot of my late companion's commination, why- 
should I grow hot at any implication of my country 
therein ? Surely her shoulders are broad enough, if 
yours or mine are not, to bear up under a considerable 
avalanche of this kind. It is the bit of truth in every 
slander, the hint of likeness in every caricature, that 
makes us smart. " Art thou there, old Truepenny ? " l 
How did your blade know its way so well to that one 
loose rivet in our armor? I wondered whether Ameri- 
cans were over-sensitive in this respect, whether they 
were more touchy than other folks.* On the whole, 
I thought we were not. Plutarch, who at least had 
studied philosophy, if he had not mastered it, could 
not stomach something Herodotus had said of Boeo- 
tia, 2 and devoted an essay to showing up the delight- 
ful old traveller's malice and ill-breeding. French 
editors leave out of Montaigne's " Travels " some re- 
marks of his about France, for reasons best known 
to themselves. Pachydermatous Deutschland, covered 
with trophies from every field of letters, still winces 
under that question which Pere Bouhours 3 put two 
centuries ago, Si un Allemand pent etre helesprit f 4 
John Bull grew apoplectic with angry amazement at 
the audacious persiflage of Piickler-Muskau. 5 To be 

1 See Hamlet, Act I., Scene 5. Truepenny is derived from the 
Greek trupanon, trupao, to bore or penetrate. 

2 Plutarch was born at Chaeronea in Bceotia. 

3 A French Jesuit author and critic. 

4 If a German can be a man of wit. 

5 Hermann Ludwig Heinrich, prince of Piickler-Muskau, 1785- 
1871. A German author who was made a prince by the king of 
Prussia in return for the relinquishment of certain privileges. 
In his book Briefe eines Verstorbenen, he expresses himself very 
freely about England and other countries, and also about many 
prominent people. 



sure, lie was a prince, — but that was not all of it, for 
a chance phrase of gentle Hawthorne sent a spasm 
through all the journals of England. Then this ten- 
derness is not peculiar to us f Console yourself, dear 
man and brother, whatever else you may be sure of, 
be sure at least of this, that you are dreadfully like 
other people. Human nature- has a much greater 
genius for sameness than for originality, or the world 
would be at a sad pass shortly. The surprising thing 
is that men have such a taste for this somewhat musty 
flavor, that an Englishman, for example, should feel 
himself defrauded, nay, even outraged, when he comes 
over here and finds a people speaking what he admits 
to be something like English, and yet so very differ- 
ent from (or, as he would say, to) those he left at 
home. Nothing, I am sure, equals my thankfulness 
when I meet an Englishman who is not like every 
other, or, I may add, an American of the same odd 
turn. 

Certainly it is no shame to a man that he should 
be as nice about his country as about his sweetheart, 
and who ever heard even the friendliest appreciation 
of that unexpressive she that did not seem to fall in- 
finitely short ? Yet it would hardly be wise to hold 
every one an enemy who could not see her with our 
own enchanted eyes. It seems to be the common 
opinion of foreigners that Americans are too tender 
upon this point. Perhaps we are ; and if so, there 
must be a reason for it. Have we had fair play? 
Could the eyes of what is called Good Society (though 
it is so seldom true either to the adjective or noun) 
look upon a nation of democrats with any chance of 
receiving an undistorted image ? Were not those, 
moreover, who found in the old order of things an 



46 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

earthly paradise, paying them quarterly dividends for 
the wisdom of their ancestors, with the punctuality 
of the seasons, unconsciously bribed to misunderstand 
if not to misrepresent us ? Whether at war or at 
peace, there we were, a standing menace to all earthly 
paradises of that kind, fatal underminers of the very 
credit on which the dividends were based, all the more 
hateful and terrible that our destructive agency was 
so insidious, working invisible in the elements, as it 
seemed, active while they slept, and coming upon them 
in the darkness like an armed man. Could Laius 
have the proper feelings of a father towards OEdipus, 
announced as his destined destroyer by infallible ora- 
cles, and felt to be such by every conscious fibre of his 
soul ? For more than a century the Dutch were the 
laughing-stock of polite Europe. They were butter- 
firkins, swillers of beer and schnaps, and their vrouws 
from whom Holbein painted the ail-but loveliest of 
Madonnas, Rembrandt the graceful girl who sits 
immortal on his knee in Dresden, 1 and Rubens his 
abounding goddesses, were the synonymes of clumsy 
vulgarity. Even so late as Irving the ships of the 
greatest navigators in the world were represented 
as sailing equally well stern-foremost. That the aris- 
tocratic Venetians should have 

" Riveted with gigantic piles 
Thorough the centre their new-catched miles," 

was heroic. But the far more marvellous achieve- 
ment of the Dutch in the same kind was ludicrous 
even to republican Marvell. 2 Meanwhile, during that 

1 The reference is to a portrait of Rembrandt's wife Saskia, 
in the Dresden Gallery. 

2 Andrew Marvell, an English poet and an incorruptible poli- 
tician, of the time of Charles II. 



CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 47 

very century of scorn, they were the best artists, 
sailors, merchants, bankers, printers, scholars, juris- 
consults, and statesmen in Europe, and the genius of 
Motley has revealed them to us, earning a right to 
themselves by the most heroic struggle in human 
annals. But, alas ! they were not merely simple bur- 
ghers who had fairly made themselves High Mighti- 
nesses, and could treat on equal terms with anointed 
kings, but their commonwealth carried in its bosom 
the germs of democracy. They even unmuzzled, at 
least after dark, that dreadful mastiff, the Press, 
whose scent is, or ought to be, so keen for wolves in 
sheep's clothing and for certain other animals in lions' 
skins. They made fun of Sacred Majesty, and, what 
was worse, managed uncommonly well without it. 1 In 
an age when periwigs made so large a part of the 
natural dignity of man, people with such a turn of 
mind were dangerous. How could they seem other 
than vulgar and hateful ? 

In the natural course of things we succeeded to this 
unenviable position of general butt. The Dutch had 
thriven under it pretty well, and there was hope that 
we could at least contrive to worry along. And we 
certainly did in a very redoubtable fashion. Perhaps 
we deserved some of the sarcasm more than our Dutch 
predecessors in office. We had nothing to boast of in 
arts or letters, and were given to bragging overmuch 
of our merely material prosperity, due quite as much 
to the virtue of our continent as to our own. There 
was some truth in Carlyle's sneer, after all. Till we 
had succeeded in some higher way than this, we had 
only the success of physical growth. Our greatness, 
like that of enormous Russia, was greatness on the 
1 See Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic. 



48 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

map, — barbarian mass only ; but had we gone down, 
like that other Atlantis, 1 in some vast cataclysm, we 
should have covered but a pin's point on the chart 
of memory, compared with those ideal spaces occupied 
by tiny Attica and cramped England. At the same 
time, our critics somewhat too easily forgot that ma- 
terial must make ready the foundation for ideal tri- 
umphs, that the arts have no chance in poor countries. 
But it must be allowed that democracy stood for a 
great deal in our shortcoming. The " Edinburgh Ke- 
view " never would have thought of asking, " Who 
reads a Russian book ? " 2 and England was satisfied 
with iron from Sweden without being impertinently 

1 An island mentioned by Plato and other classical writers. 
The question of its real existence has been much debated. 

" The most famous of all the Athenian exploits was the over- 
throw of the island Atlantis. This was a continent lying over 
against the pillars of Hercules, in extent greater than Libya 
and Asia put together, and was the passage to other islands 
and to another continent of which the Mediterranean Sea was 
only the harbor ; and within the pillars the empire of Atlan- 
tis reached to Egypt and Tyrrhenia. This mighty power was 
arrayed against Egypt and Hellas and all the countries bor- 
dering on the Mediterranean. Then did your city [Athens] 
bravely, and won renown over the whole earth. For at the 
peril of her own existence, and when the other Hellenes had 
deserted her, she repelled the invader, and of her own accord 
gave liberty to all the nations within the pillars. 

" A little while afterwards there was a great earthquake, and 
your warrior race all sank into the earth ; and the great island 
of Atlantis also disappeared in the sea." Jowett's Introduction 
to the Timceus of Plato. 

2 Sydney Smith, in his review of Seybert's Annals of the 
United States, published in the Edinburgh Review in 1820, asked, 
" In the four quarters of the globe who reads an American book ? 
or goes to an American play ? or looks at an American picture 
or statue ? " 



CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 49 

inquisitive after her painters and statuaries. Was it 
that they expected too much from the mere miracle 
of Freedom ? Is it not the highest art of a Republic 
to make men of flesh and blood, and not the marble 
ideals of such ? It may be fairly doubted whether we 
have produced this higher type of man yet. Perhaps 
it is the collective, not the individual, humanity that 
is to have a chance of nobler development among us. 
We shall see. We have a vast amount of imported 
ignorance, and, still worse, of native ready-made know- 
ledge, to digest before even the preliminaries of such 
a consummation can be arranged. We have got to 
learn that statesmanship is the most complicated of 
all arts, and to come back to the apprenticeship- 
system too hastily abandoned. At present, we trust 
a man with making constitutions on less proof of com- 
petence than we should demand before we gave him 
our shoe to patch. We have nearly reached the limit 
of the reaction from the old notion, which paid too 
much regard to birth and station as qualifications 
for office, and have touched the extreme point in the 
opposite direction, putting the highest of human func- 
tions up at auction to be bid for by any creature capa- 
ble of going upright on two legs. In some places, 
we have arrived at a point at which civil society is 
no longer possible, and already another reaction has 
begun, not backwards to the old system, but towards 
fitness either from natural aptitude or special train- 
ing. But will it always be safe to let evils work their 
own cure by becoming unendurable ? Every one of 
them leaves its taint in the constitution of the body- 
politic, each in itself, perhaps, trifling, yet all together 
powerful for evil. 

But whatever we might do or leave undone, we 



50 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

were not genteel, and it was uncomfortable to be con- 
tinually reminded that, though we should boast that 
we were the Great West till we were black in the 
face, it did not bring us an inch nearer to the world's 
West-End. 1 That sacred enclosure of respectability 
was tabooed to us. The Holy Alliance did not in- 
scribe us on its visiting-list. The Old World of wigs 
and orders and liveries would shop with us, but we 
must ring at the area-bell, and not venture to awaken 
the more august clamors of the knocker. Our man- 
ners, it must be granted, had none of those graces 
that stamp the caste of Yere de Vere, in whatever 
museum of British antiquities they may be hidden. 
In short, we were vulgar. 

This was one of those horribly vague accusations, 
the victim of which has no defence. An umbrella is 
of no avail against a Scotch mist. It envelops you, it 
penetrates at every pore, it wets you through without 
seeming to wet you at all. Vulgarity is an eighth 
deadly sin, added to the list in these latter days, and 
worse than all the others put together, since it perils 
your salvation in this world, — far the more impor- 
tant of the two in the minds of most men. It profits 
nothing to draw nice distinctions between essential 
and conventional, for the convention in this case is 
the essence, and you may break every command of 
the decalogue with perfect good-breeding, nay, if you 
are adroit, without losing caste. We, indeed, had it 
not to lose, for we had never gained it. " How am I 
vulgar?" asks the culprit, slmdderingly. "Because 
thou art not like unto Us," answers Lucifer, Son of 
the Morning, and there is no more to be said. The 
god of this world may be a fallen angel, but he has us 

1 The West-End of London is the fashionable part of the city. 



CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 51 

there ! We were as clean, — so far as my observation 
goes, I think we were cleaner, morally and physically, 
than the English, and therefore, of course, than every- 
body else. But we did not pronounce the diphthong 
ou as they did, and we said eether and not eyther, 
following therein the fashion of our ancestors, who 
unhappily could bring over no English better than 
Shakespeare's ; 1 and we did not stammer as they 
had learned to do from the courtiers, who in this way 
flattered the Hanoverian king, a foreigner among the 
people he had come to reign over. Worse than all, 
we might have the noblest ideas and the finest sen- 
timents in the world, but we vented them through 
that organ by which men are led rather than lead- 
ers, though some physiologists would persuade us that 
Nature furnishes her captains with a fine handle to 
their faces that Opportunity may get a good purchase 
on them for dragging them to the front. 

This state of things was so painful that excellent 
people were not wanting who gave their whole genius 
to reproducing here the original Bull, whether by 
gaiters, the cut of their whiskers, by a factitious bru- 
tality in their tone, or by an accent that was forever 
tripping and falling flat over the tangled roots of our 
common tongue. Martyrs -to a false ideal, it never 
occurred to them that nothing is more hateful to gods 
and men than a second-rate Englishman, and for the 
very reason that this planet never produced a more 
splendid creature than the first-rate one, witness 
Shakespeare and the Indian Mutiny. Witness that 
truly sublime self-abnegation of those prisoners lately 

1 Some forms of speech which the English of to-day are 
pleased to call Americanisms were current in England in the 
time of Shakespeare. 



52 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

among the bandits of Greece, where average men 
gave an example of quiet fortitude for which all the 
stoicism of antiquity can show no match. Witness 
the wreck of the Birkenhead, an example of disci- 
plined heroism, perhaps the most precious, as the 
rarest, of all. If we could contrive to be not too un- 
obtrusively our simple selves, we should be the most 
delightful of human beings, and the most original ; 
whereas, when the plating of Anglicism rubs off, as it 
always will in points that come to much wear, we are 
liable to very unpleasing conjectures about the qual- 
ity of the metal underneath. Perhaps one reason why 
the average Briton spreads himself here with such an 
easy air of superiority may be owing to the fact that 
he meets with so many bad imitations as to conclude 
himself the only real thing in a wilderness of shams. 
He fancies himself moving through an endless Blooms- 
bury, 1 where his mere apparition confers honor as an 
avatar of the court-end of the universe. Not a Bull 
of them all but is persuaded lie bears Europa upon 
his back. This is the sort of fellow whose patronage 
is so divertingly insufferable. Thank Heaven he is 
not the only specimen of cater-cousinship from the 
dear old Mother Island that is shown to us ! Among 
genuine things, I know nothing more genuine than 
the better men whose limbs were made in England. 
So manly-tender, so brave, so true, so warranted to 
wear, they make us proud to feel that blood is thicker 
than water. 

But it is not merely the Englishman ; every Euro- 
pean candidly admits in himself some right of primo- 
geniture in respect of us, and pats this shaggy continent 
on the back with a lively sense of generous unbending. 

1 A district of London, once fashionable, but no longer so. 



CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 53 

The German who plays the bass-viol has a well-founded 
contempt, which he is not always nice in concealing, 
for a country so few of whose children ever take that 
noble instrument between their knees. His cousin, 
the Ph. D. from Gottingen, cannot help despising a 
people who do not grow loud and red over Aryans 
and Turanians, and are indifferent about their descent 
from either. The Frenchman feels an easy mastery 
in speaking his mother tongue, and attributes it to 
some native superiority of parts that lifts him high 
above us barbarians of the West. The Italian prima 
donna sweeps a curtsy of careless pity to the over- 
facile pit which unsexes her with the bravo ! inno- 
cently meant to show a familiarity with foreign usage. 
But all without exception make no secret of regarding 
us as the goose bound to deliver them a golden egg in 
return for their cackle. Such men as Agassiz, Guyot, 
and Goldwin Smith come with gifts in their hands ; 
but since it is commonly European failures who bring 
hither their remarkable gifts and acquirements, this 
view of the case is sometimes just the least bit in the 
world provoking. To think what a delicious seclu- 
sion of contempt we enjoyed till California and our 
own ostentatious parvenus, flinging gold away in Eu- 
rope that might have endowed libraries at home, gave 
us the ill repute of riches ! What a shabby downfall 
from the Arcadia 1 which the French officers of our 
Revolutionary War fancied they saw here through 
Eousseau-tinted spectacles ! 2 Something of Arcadia 
there really was, something of the Old Age ; and that 

1 See Democracy, note on p. 5. 

2 Rousseau's book Du Contrat Social, a somewhat visionary 
scheme of government, exerted considerable influence during the 
period preceding the French Revolution. 



54 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

divine provincialism were cheaply repurchased could 
we have it back again in exchange for the tawdry 
upholstery that has taken its place. 

For some reason or other, the European has rarely 
been able to see America except in caricature. Would 
the first Review of the world have printed the niai- 
series 1 of M. Maurice Sand as a picture of society in 
any civilized country? M. Sand, to be sure, has in- 
herited nothing of his famous mother's literary outfit, 
except the pseudonym. But since the conductors of 
the " Revue " could not have published his story be- 
cause it was clever, they must have thought it valuable 
for its truth. As true as the last-century English- 
man's picture of Jean Crapaud ! 2 We do not ask to 
be sprinkled with rosewater, but may perhaps fairly 
protest against being drenched with the rinsings of 
an unclean imagination. The next time the " Revue " 
allows such ill-bred persons to throw their slops out of 
its first-floor windows, let it honestly preface the dis- 
charge with a gave Veau 1 3 that we may run from 
under in season. And M. Duvergier de Hauranne, 4 
who knows how to be entertaining ! I know that le 
Frangais est plutbt indiscret que confiant, 5 and the 

1 Niaiseries == nonsense. Mr. Lowell refers to Six Mille 
Lieues a Toute Vapeur published in 1862 in the Revue des Deux 
Mondes. 

2 The name Jean Crapaud is applied to a Frenchman as John 
Bull is to an Englishman. Its origin may be found in the device 
of the ancient kings of France, three toads erect, saltant. Nos- 
tradamus in the sixteenth century called the French "cra- 
pauds" (toads). 

3 Take care below. (Literally, Look out for the water.) 

4 The reference is to M. Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne's 
book, Huit mois en Amerique • lettres et notes de voyage 1864-65. 

6 The Frenchman is indiscreet rather than presumptuous. 



CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 55 

pen slides too easily when indiscretions will fetch so 
much a page; but should we not have been tant-soit- 
peu more cautious had we been writing about people 
on the other side of the Channel? But then it is a 
fact in the natural history of the American long fa- 
miliar to Europeans, that he abhors privacy, knows 
not the meaning of reserve, lives in hotels because of 
their greater publicity, and is never so pleased as 
when his domestic affairs (if he may be said to have 
any) are paraded in the newspapers. Barnum, it is 
well known, represents perfectly the average national 
sentiment in this respect. However it be, we are not 
treated like other people, or perhaps I should say like 
people who are ever likely to be met with in society. 

Is it in the climate ? Either I have a false notion 
of European manners, or else the atmosphere affects 
them strangely when exported hither. Perhaps they 
suffer from the sea-voyage like some of the more deli- 
cate wines. During our Civil War an English gen- 
tleman of the highest description was kind enough to 
call upon me, mainly, as it seemed, to inform me how 
entirely he sympathized with the Confederates, and 
how sure he felt that we could never subdue them, — 
" they were the gentlemen of the country, you know." 
Another, the first greetings hardly over, asked me how 
I accounted for the universal meagreness of my coun- 
trymen. To a thinner man than I, or from a stouter 
man than he, the question might have been offensive. 
The Marquis of Hartington x wore a secession badge 

1 One of Mr. Lincoln's neatest strokes of humor was his treat- 
ment of this gentleman when a laudable curiosity induced him to 
be presented to the President of the Broken Bubble. Mr. Lin- 
coln persisted in calling him Mr. Partington. Surely the refine- 
ment of good-breeding could go no further. Giving the young 



56 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

at a public ball in New York. In a civilized country 
he might have been roughly handled ; but here, where 
the bienseances are not so well understood, of course 
nobody minded it. A French traveller told me he 
had been a good deal in the British colonies, and had 
been astonished to see how soon the people became 
Americanized. He added, with delightful bonhomie, 
and as if he were sure it would charm me, that " they 
even began to talk through their noses, just like you ! " 
I was naturally ravished with this testimony to the 
assimilating power of democracy, and could only reply 
that I hoped they would never adopt our democratic 
patent-method of seeming to settle one's honest debts, 
for they would find it paying through the nose in the 
long-run. I am a man of the New World, and do not 
know precisely the present fashion of May-Fair, 1 but 
I have a kind of feeling that if an American (mutato 
nomine, de te 2 is always frightfully possible) were to 
do this kind of thing under a European roof, it would 
induce some disagreeable reflections as to the ethical 
results of democracy. I read the other day in print 
the remark of a British tourist who had eaten large 
quantities of our salt, such as it is (I grant it has not 
the European savor), that the Americans were hos- 
pitable, no doubt, but that it was partly because they 
longed for foreign visitors to relieve the tedium of 

man his real name (already notorious in the newspapers) would 
have made his visit an insult. Had Henri IV. done this, it 
would have been famous. — J. R. L. 

1 A district of London so named from a fair which formerly 
was held there in May. As it is the abode of the upper class, 
the name has come to be the synonym of fashion and exclu- 
siveness. 

2 Mutato nomine, de te hsec fabula narratur : Change 
the name, and this story is told of you. 



CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 57 

their dead-level existence, and partly from ostentation. 
What shall we do ? Shall we close our doors ? Not 
I, for one, if I should so have forfeited the friendship 
of L. S., 1 most lovable of men. He somehow seems 
to find us human, at least, and so did Clough, 2 whose 
poetry will one of these days, perhaps, be found to 
have been the best utterance in verse of this genera- 
tion. And T. H., 3 the mere grasp of whose manly 
hand carries with it the pledge of frankness and 
friendship, of an abiding simplicity of nature as affect- 
ing as it is rare ! 

The fine old Tory aversion of former times was not 
hard to bear. There was something even refreshing 
in it, as in a northeaster to a hardy temperament. 
When a British parson, travelling in Newfoundland 
while the slash of our separation was still raw, after 
prophesying a glorious future for an island that con- 
tinued to dry its fish under the aegis of Saint George, 
glances disdainfully over his spectacles in parting at 
the U. S. A., and forebodes for them a " speedy re- 
lapse into barbarism," now that they have madly cut 
themselves off from the humanizing influences of Brit- 
ain, I smile with barbarian self-conceit. But this 
kind of thing became by degrees an unpleasant ana- 
chronism. For meanwhile the young giant was grow- 
ing, was beginning indeed to feel tight in his clothes, 
was obliged to let in a gore here and there in Texas, in 
California, in New Mexico, in Alaska, and had the 
scissors and needle and thread ready for Canada when 
the time came. His shadow loomed like a Brocken- 

1 Leslie Stephen. 

2 Arthur Hugh Clough lived in Cambridge a year during the 
fifties, and was Lowell's near neighbor. 

3 Thomas Hughes. 



58 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

spectre x over against Europe^ — the shadow of what 
they were coming to, that was the unpleasant part of 
it. Even in such misty image as they had of him, 
it was painfully evident that his clothes were not of 
any cut hitherto fashionable, nor conceivable by a 
Bond Street tailor, — and this in an age, too, when 
everything depends upon clothes, when, if we do not 
keep up appearances, the seeming-solid frame of this 
universe, nay, your very God, would slump into him- 
self, like a mockery king of snow, being nothing, after 
all, but a prevailing mode, a make-believe of believ- 
ing. From this moment the young giant assumed the 
respectable aspect of a phenomenon, to be got rid of 
if possible, but at any rate as legitimate a subject of 
human study as the glacial period or the silurian what- 
d'ye-call-ems. If the man of the primeval drift-heaps 
be so absorbingly interesting, why not the man of the 
drift that is just beginning, of the drift into whose 
irresistible current we are just being sucked whether 
we will or no ? If I were in their place, I confess I 
should not be frightened. Man has survived so much, 
and contrived to be comfortable on this planet after 
surviving so much ! I am something of a protestant 
in matters of government also, and am willing to get 
rid of vestments and ceremonies and to come down to 
bare benches, if only faith in God take the place of a 
general agreement to profess confidence in ritual and 
sham. Every mortal man of us holds stock in the 

1 Brocket! or Blocksberg is the highest summit of the Hartz 
Mountains in Germany. The surrounding valleys at times send 
up columns of vapor, leaving a space at the top of the mountain 
clear, and at sunset or sunrise the shadows of persons on this 
plateau are cast upon the bank of cloud, and produce the phe- 
nomenon known as the Brockengespenst, or Spectre of the 
Brocken. 



CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 59 

only public debt that is absolutely sure of payment, 
and that is the debt of the Maker of this Universe to 
the Universe he has made. I have no notion of sell- 
ing out my shares in a panic. 

It was something to have advanced even to the 
dignity of a phenomenon, and yet I do not know that 
the relation of the individual American to the indi- 
vidual European was bettered by it ; and that, after 
all, must adjust itself comfortably before there can 
be a right understanding between the two. We had 
been a desert, we became a museum. People came 
hither for scientific and not social ends. The very 
cockney could not complete his education without 
taking a vacant stare at us in passing. But the soci- 
ologists (I think they call themselves so) were the 
hardest to bear. There was no escape. I have even 
known a professor of this fearful science to come dis- 
guised in petticoats. We were cross-examined as a 
chemist cross-examines a new substance. Human ? 
yes, all the elements are present, though abnormally 
combined. Civilized ? Hm ! that needs a stricter 
assay. No entomologist could take a more friendly 
interest in a strange bug. After a few such experi- 
ences, I, for one, have felt as if I were merely one of 
those horrid things preserved in spirits (and very bad 
spirits, too) in a cabinet. I was not the fellow-being 
of these explorers : I was a curiosity ; I was a speci- 
men. Hath not an American organs, dimensions, 
senses, affections, passions even as a European hath ? 
If you prick us, do we not bleed ? If you tickle us, 
do we not laugh ? I will not keep on with Shylock 
to his next question but one. 1 

1 "If you wrong us shall we not revenge?" Merchant of 
Venice, Act III., Scene 1. 



y 



' r 



60 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

Till after our Civil War it never seemed to enter 
the head of any foreigner, especially of any English- 
man, that an American had what could be called a 
country, except as a place to eat, sleep, and trade in. 
Then it seemed to strike them suddenly. " By Jove, 
you know, fellahs don't fight like that for a shop- 
till ! " No, I rather think not. To Americans America 
is something more than a promise and an expectation. 
It has a past and traditions of its own. A descent 
from men who sacrificed everything and came hither, 
not to better their fortunes, but to plant their idea in 
virgin soil, should be a good pedigree. There was 
never colony save this that went forth, not to seek 
gold, but God. Is it not as well to have sprung from 
such as these as from some burly beggar who came 
over with Wilhelmus Conquestor, unless, indeed, a 
line grow better as it runs farther away from stalwart 
ancestors ? And for our history, it is dry enough, no 
doubt, in the books, but, for all that, is of a kind that 
tells in the blood. I have admitted that Carlyle's 
sneer a had a show of truth in it. But what does he 
himself, like a true Scot, admire in the Hohenzol- 
lerns ? First of all, that they were canny, a thrifty, 
forehanded race. Next, that they made a good fight 
from generation to generation with the chaos around 
them. That is precisely the battle which the English 
race on this continent has been pushing doughtily for- 
ward for two centuries and a half. Doughtily and 
silently, for you cannot hear in Europe " that crash, 
the death - song of the perfect tree," that has been 
going on here from sturdy father to sturdy son, and 
making this continent habitable for the weaker Old 
World breed that has swarmed to it during the last 
1 See Democracy, p. 21. 



CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 61 

half -century. If ever men did a good stroke of work 
on this planet, it was the forefathers of those whom 
you are wondering whether it would not be prudent to 
acknowledge as far-off cousins. Alas, man of genius, 
to whom we owe so much, could you see nothing more 
than the burning of a foul chimney in that clash of 
Michael and Satan 1 which flamed up under your very 
eyes ? 

Before our war we were to Europe but a huge mob 
of adventurers and shopkeepers. Leigh Hunt ex- 
pressed it well enough when he said that he could 
never think of America without seeing a gigantic 
counter stretched all along the seaboard. And Leigh 
Hunt, without knowing it, had been more than half 
Americanized, too ! Feudalism had by degrees made 
commerce, the great civilizer, contemptible. But a 
tradesman with sword on thigh and very prompt of 
stroke was not only redoubtable, he had become re- 
spectable also. Few people, I suspect, alluded twice 
to a needle in Sir John Hawk wood's 2 presence, after 
that doughty fighter had exchanged it for a more 
dangerous tool of the same metal. Democracy had 
been hitherto only a ludicrous effort to reverse the 
laws of nature by thrusting Cleon into the place of 
Pericles. But a democracy that could fight for an 
abstraction, whose members held life and goods cheap 
compared with that larger life which we call country, 
was not merely unheard-of, but portentous. It was 
the nightmare of the Old World taking upon itself 

1 See Paradise Lost, Book VI. 

2 An English adventurer who in his youth had been appren- 
ticed to a tailor. He served with honor in the army, and was 
knighted by Edward III. He afterward attained wealth and 
renown in the Italian wars of the fourteenth century. 



^/ 



62 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

flesh and blood, turning out to be substance and not 
dream. Since the Norman crusader clanged down 
upon the throne of the porphyro-geniti^ 1 carefully- 
draped appearances had never received such a shock, 
had never been so rudely called on to produce their 
titles to the empire of the world. Authority has had 
its periods not unlike those of geology, and at last 
comes Man claiming kingship in right of his mere 
manhood. The world of the Saurians might be in 
some respects more picturesque, but the march of 
events is inexorable, and that world is bygone. 

The young giant had certainly got out of long- 
clothes. He had become the enfant terrible of the 
human household. It was not and will not be easy 
for the world (especially for our British cousins) to 
look upon us as grown up. The youngest of nations, 
its people must also be young and to be treated ac- 
cordingly, was the syllogism, — as if libraries did not 
make all nations equally old in all those respects, at 
least, where age is an advantage and not a defect. 
Youth, no doubt, has its good qualities, as people feel 
who are losing it, but boyishness is another thing. 
We had been somewhat boyish as a nation, a little 
loud, a little pushing, a little braggart. But might 
it not partly have been because we felt that we had 
certain claims to respect that were not admitted ? 
The war which established our position as a vigorous 
nationality has also sobered us. A nation, like a man, 
cannot look death in the eye for four years without 
some strange reflections, without arriving at some 
clearer consciousness of the stuff it is made of, with- 
out some great moral change. Such a change, or the 

1 Born in the purple ; a term applied to sons of a monarch 
born after his accession to the throne. 



CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 63 

beginning of it, no observant person can fail to see 
here. Our thought and our politics, our bearing as 
a people, are assuming a manlier tone. We have 
been compelled to see what was weak in democracy 
as well as what was strong. We have begun ob- 
scurely to recognize that things do not go of them- 
selves, and that popular government is not in itself 
a panacea, is no better than any other form except 
as the virtue and wisdom of the people make it so, and 
that when men undertake to do their own kingship, 
they enter upon the dangers and responsibilities as 
well as the privileges of the function. Above all, it 
looks as if we were on the way to be persuaded that no 
government can be carried on by declamation. It is 
noticeable also that facility of communication has 
made the best English and French thought far more 
directly operative here than ever before. Without 
being Europeanized, our discussion of important ques- 
tions in statesmanship, in political economy, in aesthet- 
ics, is taking a broader scope and a higher tone. It 
had certainly been provincial, one might almost say 
local, to a very unpleasant extent. Perhaps our ex- 
perience in soldiership has taught us to value training 
more than we have been popularly wont. We may 
possibly come to the conclusion, one of these days, 
that self-made men may not be always equally skilful 
in the manufacture of wisdom, may not be divinely 
commissioned to fabricate the higher qualities of opin- 
ion on all possible topics of human interest. 

So long as we continue to be the most common- 
schooled and the least cultivated people in the world, 
I suppose we must consent to endure this condescend- 
ing manner of foreigners toward us. The more 
friendly they mean to be, the more ludicrously pro- 



64 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

minent it becomes. They can never appreciate the 
immense amount of silent work that has been done 
here, making this continent slowly fit for the abode of 
man, and which will demonstrate itself, let us hope, 
in the character of the people. Outsiders can only be 
expected to judge a nation by the amount it has con- 
tributed to the civilization of the world ; the amount, 
that is, that can be seen and handled. A great place 
in history can only be achieved by competitive exami- 
nations, nay, by a long course of them. How much 
new thought have we contributed to the common 
stock ? Till that question can be triumphantly an- 
swered, or needs no answer, we must continue to be 
simply interesting as an experiment, to be studied 
as a problem, and not respected as an attained result 
or an accomplished solution. Perhaps, as I have 
hinted, their patronizing manner toward us is the fair 
result of their failing to see here anything more than 
a poor imitation, a plaster-cast of Europe. And are 
they not partly right ? If the tone of the uncultivated 
American has too often the arrogance of the barbarian, 
is not that of the cultivated as often vulgarly apolo- 
getic ? In the America they meet with is there the 
simplicity, the manliness, the absence of sham, the sin- 
cere human nature, the sensitiveness to duty and im- 
plied obligation, that in any way distinguishes us from 
what our orators call " the effete civilization of the 
Old World " ? Is there a politician among us daring 
enough (except a Dana here and there : ) to risk his 
future on the chance of our keeping our word with 

1 The reference is to Richard Henry Dana, jurist, politician, 
and author ; one of the founders of the Free Soil Party, in 1848, 
and a life-long friend of Lowell. He was a son of Richard 
Henry Dana, the poet and essayist. 



CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 65 

the exactness of superstitious communities like Eng- 
land ? Is it certain that we shall be ashamed of a 
bankruptcy of honor, if we can only keep the letter 
of our bond ? I hope we shall be able to answer all 
these questions with a frank yes. At any rate, we 
would advise our visitors that we are not merely curi- 
ous creatures, but belong to the family of man, and 
that, as individuals, we are not to be always subjected 
to the competitive examination above mentioned, even 
if we acknowledged their competence as an examin- 
ing board. Above all, 8 we beg them to remember that 
America is not to us, as to them, a mere object of 
external interest to be discussed and analyzed, but in 
us, part 'of our very marrow. Let them not suppose 
that we conceive of ourselves as exiles from the graces 
and amenities of an older date than we, though very 
much at home in a state of things not yet all it might 
be or should be, but which we mean to make so, and 
which we find both wholesome and pleasant for men 
(though perhaps not for dilettanti) to live in. " The 
full tide of human existence " may be felt here as 
keenly as Johnson felt it at Charing Cross, and in a 
larger sense. I know one person who is singular 
enough to think Cambridge the very best spot on the 
habitable globe. " Doubtless God could have made 
a better, but doubtless he never did." 1 

It will take England a great while to get over her 
airs of patronage toward us, or even passably to con- 
ceal them. She cannot help confounding the people 
with the country, and regarding us as lusty juveniles. 

1 This saying originated with Dr. William Butler, who died 
in England in 1621. He declared of the strawberry : " Doubt- 
less God could have made a better berry, but doubtless he never 
did." 



66 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

She has a conviction that whatever good there is in us 
is wholly English, when the truth is that we are worth 
nothing except so far as we have disinfected ourselves 
of Anglicism. She is especially condescending just 
now, and lavishes sugar-plums on us as if we had not 
outgrown them. I am no believer in sudden conver- 
sions, especially in sudden conversions to a favorable 
opinion of people who have just proved you to be mis- 
taken in judgment and therefore unwise in policy. I 
never blamed her for not wishing well to democracy, 
— how should she ? — but Alabamas are not wishes. 
Let her not be too hasty in believing Mr. Keverdy 
Johnson's 1 pleasant words. Though there is no 
thoughtful man in America who would not Consider 
a war with England the greatest of calamities, yet the 
feeling towards her here is very far from cordial, 
whatever our Minister may say in the effusion that 
comes after ample dining. Mr. Adams, 2 with his 
famous " My Lord, this means war," perfectly repre- 
sented his country. Justly or not, we have a feeling 
that we have been wronged, not merely insulted. 
The only sure way of bringing about a healthy rela- 
tion between the two countries is for Englishmen to 

1 At the time Mr. Lowell was writing this essay the settle- 
ment of the Alabama claims was pending. Reverdy Johnson 
was minister to England, and his action in the matter was so 
unsatisfactory to his own government that he was recalled. 

2 During the Civil War Charles Francis Adams, who was then 
minister to England, urged forcibly upon that nation that it 
should not allow Confederate cruisers to be fitted out in its 
ports. Lord Russell thought the government could not inter- 
fere. But when, a little later, Mr. Adams informed him that 
a certain iron-clad ram was about to leave Liverpool on its hos- 
tile errand against the United States, and added, " It would be 
superfluous in me to point out to your lordship that this is war," 
means were found to prevent the vessel from sailing. 



CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 67 

clear their minds of the notion that we are always 
to be treated as a kind of inferior and deported Eng- 
lishman whose nature they perfectly understand, and 
whose back they accordingly stroke the wrong way of 
the fur with amazing perseverance. Let them learn 
to treat us naturally on our merits as human beings, 
as they would a German or a Frenchman, and not as 
if we were a kind of counterfeit Briton whose crime 
appeared in every shade of difference, and before long 
there would come that right feeling which we natu- 
rally call a good understanding. The common blood, 
and still more the common language, are fatal instru- 
ments of misapprehension. Let them give up trying 
to understand us, still more thinking that they do, and 
acting in various absurd ways as the necessary conse- 
quence, for they will never arrive at that devoutly-to- 
be- wished consummation, till they learn to look at us 
as we are and not as they suppose us to be. Dear old 
long-estranged mother-in-law, it is a great many years 
since we parted. Since 1660, when you married again, 
you have been a step-mother to us. Put on your spec- 
tacles, dear madam. Yes, we have grown, and changed 
likewise. You would not let us darken your doors, 
if you could help it. We know that perfectly well. 
But pray, when we look to be treated as men, don't 
shake that rattle in our faces, nor talk baby to us any 
longer. 

" Do, child, go to it grandam, child ; 
Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will 
Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig ! " 1 

1 See King John, Act II., Scene 1. 



THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 1 

Three years ago I was one of those who gathered 
in the Sanders Theatre to commemorate the two hun- 
dred and fiftieth anniversary of a college founded to 
perpetuate living learning chiefly by the help of three 
dead languages, the Hebrew, the Greek, and the 
Latin. I have given them that order of precedence 
which they had in the minds of those our pious 
founders. The Hebrew came first because they be- 
lieved that it had been spoken by God himself, and 
that it would have been the common speech of man- 
kind but for the judicial invention of the modern lan- 
guages at Shinar. 2 Greek came next because the 
New Testament was written in that tongue, and Latin 
last as the interpreter between scholars. Of the men 
who stood about that fateful cradle swung from bough 
of the primeval forest, there were probably few who 
believed that a book written in any living language 
could itself live. 

For nearly two hundred years no modern language 
was continuously and systematically taught here. In 
the latter half of the last century a stray Frenchman 
was caught now and then, and kept as long as he 
could endure the baiting of his pupils. After fail- 

1 The seventh annual convention of the Modern Language 
Association of America was held at Harvard University in De- 
cember, 1889. The address by James Russell Lowell, which 
follows, was the most important one of the meeting. 

2 See Genesis xi. 1-9. 



THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 69 

ing as a teacher of his mother-tongue, he commonly 
turned dancing-master, a calling which public opinion 
seems to have put on the same intellectual level with 
the other. Whatever haphazard teaching of French 
there may have been was, no doubt, for the benefit of 
those youth of the better classes who might go abroad 
after taking their degrees. By hook or by crook 
some enthusiasts managed to learn German, 1 but there 
was no official teacher before Dr. Pollen about sixty 
years ago. When at last a chair of French and 
Spanish was established, it was rather with an eye to 
commerce than to culture. 

It indicates a very remarkable, and, I think, whole- 
some change in our way of looking at things that I 
should now be addressing a numerous Society com- 
posed wholly of men engaged in teaching thoroughly 
and scientifically the very languages once deemed 
unworthy to be taught at all except as a social accom- 
plishment or as a commercial subsidiary. There are 
now, I believe, as many teachers in that single depart- 
ment of Harvard College as sufficed for the entire 
undergraduate course when I took my first degree. 
And this change has taken place within two genera- 
tions. 

Tw §' rjhrj Svo [xkv yeveal jxepoirwv avOpwiroiv 



'E<£0i' 



' 2 



tat? . 



1 Mr. George Bancroft told me that he learned German of 
Professor Sydney Willard, who, himself self-taught, had no 
notion of its pronunciation. One instructor in French we had, a 
little more than a century ago, in Albert Gallatin, a Swiss, after- 
wards eminent as a teacher in statesmanship and diplomacy. 
There was no regularly appointed tutor in French before 1806. — 
J. R. L. 

2 " Two ages were increased 
Of divers-languaged men." 



70 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

I make this familiar quotation for two reasons : be- 
cause Chapman translates fxepoiraiv " divers-languaged," 
which is apt for our occasion, and because it enables 
me to make an easier transition to what lam about to 
say ; namely, that I rise to address you not without a 
certain feeling of embarrassment. For every man is, 
more or less consciously, the prisoner of his date, and 
I must confess that I was a great while in emancipat- 
ing myself from the formula which prescribed the 
Greek and Latin Classics as the canonical books of 
that infallible Church of Culture outside of which 
there could be no salvation, — none, at least, that 
was orthodox. Indeed, I am not sure that I have 
wholly emancipated myself even yet. The old phrases 
(for mere phrases they had mostly come to be) still 
sing in my ears with a pleasing if not a prevailing 
enchantment. 

The traditions which had dictated this formula were 
of long standing and of eminent respectability. They 
dated back to the exemplaria Grceca of Horace. 1 For 
centuries the languages which served men for all the 
occasions of private life were put under a ban, and 
the revival of learning extended this outlawry to the 
literature, such as it was, that had found vent through 
them. Even the authors of that literature tacitly 
admitted the justice of such condemnation when they 
used the word Latin as meaning language par excel- 
lence, just as the Newfoundlanders say fish when they 
mean cod. They could be witty, eloquent, pathetic, 
poetical, competent, in a word, to every demand of 
their daily lives, in their mother-tongue, as the Greeks 

1 William Y. Sellar says of Horace : " In the general prin- 
ciples which he lays down he seems to be a mere exponent of 
the canons of Greek criticism." 



THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 71 

and Romans had been in theirs, but all this would not 
do ; what was so embalmed would not keep. All the 
prudent and forethoughtful among them accordingly 
were careful to put their thoughts and fancies, or 
what with them supplied the place of these commodi- 
ties, into Latin as the one infallible pickle. They 
forgot the salt, to be sure, an ingredient which the 
author alone can furnish. For it is not the language 
in which a man writes, but what he has been able to 
make that language say or sing, that resists decay. 
Yet men were naturally a great while in reaching this 
conviction. They thought it was not good form, as 
the phrase is, to be pleased with what, and what alone, 
really touched them home. The reproach — at vestri 
proavi 1 — rang deterrent in their ears. The author 
of " Partonopeus de Blois," 2 it is true, plucks up a 
proper spirit : — 

" Cil elerc dient que n'est pas sens 
Qu'escrive estoire d'antif tens, 
Quant je nes escris en latin, 
Et que je perc mon tans enfin ; 
Cil le perdent qui ne font rien 
Moult plus que je ne fac le mien." 3 

And the sarcasm of the last couplet was more biting 
even than the author thought it. Those moderns who 
wrote in Latin truly ne faisoient rien,* for I cannot 
recollect any work of the kind that has in any sense 

1 But your forefathers ! 

2 An old French romantic poem ascribed to the twelfth or 
thirteenth century. 

3 If scholars say it is not wise that I should write a story of 
ancient times unless I write it in Latin, and that, indeed, I lose 
my time ; if they are losers who do nothing, much more I, if I 
do not my own. 

4 Did nothing. 



72 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

survived as literature, unless it be the " Epistolse Ob- 
scurorum Virorum" 1 (whose Latin is a part of its 
humor) and a few short copies of verse, as they used, 
aptly enough, to be called. Milton's foreign corre- 
spondence as Secretary for the Commonwealth was 
probably the latest instance of the use of Latin in 
diplomacy. 

You all remember Du Bellay's 2 eloquent protest, 
" I cannot sufficiently blame the foolish arrogance 
and temerity of some of our nation, who, being least 
of all Greeks or Latins, depreciate and reject with a 
more than Stoic brow everything written in French, 
and I cannot sufficiently wonder at the strange opin- 
ion of some learned men, who think our vernacular 
incapable of all good literature and erudition." When 
this was said, Montaigne was already sixteen years 
old, and, not to speak of the great mass of verse and 
prose then dormant in manuscript, France had pro- 
duced in Rabelais a great humorist and strangely 
open-eyed thinker, and in Villon 3 a poet who had writ- 
ten at least one immortal poem, which still touches us 

1 Letters of Obscure Men, a collection of satirical letters in 
dog-Latin, published in Hagenau (though professedly in Venice) 
early in the sixteenth century, and probably written, at least in 
part, by Ulric von Hutten. They were aimed against the 
monks and scholastics of the time ; and by their severe criticism 
of the doctrines, morals, and manner of life of those classes they 
contributed forcibly to the bringing about of the Reformation. 

2 Du Bellay was a French cardinal and statesman. Under 
Francis I. he was an ambassador to Henry VIII. of England, and 
to Pope Paul III. At one time, also, he was lieutenant-general 
of France in the king's absence. He protected and encouraged 
letters ; and it was at his suggestion that the College of France 
was founded. 

8 Francois Villon, the most famous French poet of the fif- 
teenth century. His first work of importance, published in 1456, 



THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 73 

with that painless sense of the lachrymce rerum 1 so 
consoling in poetry and the burthen of which 

Ou sont les neig-es d'antan ? " 2 

falters and fades away in the ear like the last stroke 
of Beauty's passing-bell. I must not let you forget 
that Du Bellay had formed himself on the classics, 
and that he insists on the assiduous study of them. 
" Devour them," he says, " not in order to imitate, 
but to turn them into blood and nutriment." And 
surely this always has been and always will be their 
true use. 

It was not long before the living languages justified 
their right to exist by producing a living literature, 
but as the knowledge of Greek and Latin was the 
exclusive privilege of a class, that class naturally 
made an obstinate defence of its vested rights. Nor 
was it less natural that men like Bacon, who felt that 
he was speaking to the civilized world, and lesser men, 
who fancied themselves charged with a pressing mes- 
sage to it, should choose to utter themselves in the 
only tongue that was cosmopolitan. But already such 
books as had more than a provincial meaning, though 
written in what the learned still looked on as patois, 
were beginning to be translated into the other Euro- 
pean languages. The invention of printing had insen- 
sibly but surely enlarged the audience which genius 
addresses. That there were persons in England who 
had learned something of French, Italian, Spanish, 
and of High and Low Dutch three centuries ago is 

was one which he called Lais, but which came to be known as 
Le Testament de Villon, or Le petit Testament, while his great 
work is Le grand Testament. 

1 Literally, the tears of things ; i. e. the sadness of life. 

2 Where are the snows of last year ? 



74 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

shown by the dramatists of the day, but the speech 
of the foreigner was still generally regarded as some- 
thing noxious. Later generations shared the prejudice 
of sturdy Abbot Samson, 1 who confirmed the manor 
of Thorpe " cuidam Anglico natione . . . de cujus 
fldelitate plenius confldebat quia bonus agricola erat 
et quia nesciebat loqui Galilee." 2 This was in 1182, 
but there is a still more amusing instance of the same 
prejudice so lately as 1668. " Erasmus hath also a 
notable story of a man of the same age, an Italian, 
that had never been in Germany, and yet he spake 
the German tongue most elegantly, being as one pos- 
sessed of the Devil ; notwithstanding was cured by a 
Physician that administered a medicine which expelled 
an infinite number of worms, whereby he was also 
freed of his knowledge of the German tongue " B 
Dr. Ramesey seems in doubt whether the vermin or 
the language were the greater deliverance. 

Even after it could no longer be maintained that 
no masterpiece could be written in a modern language, 
it was affirmed, and on very plausible grounds, that 
no masterpiece of style could be so written unless 
after sedulous study of the ancient and especially of 

1 Abbot of the Convent of St. Edmondsbury, in the time of 
Richard Cceur de Lion and his brother John. His memory has 
been preserved in the Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond. To 
general readers he is known chiefly through Carlyle, who has an 
exceedingly interesting chapter concerning him in Past and 
Present. 

2 To a certain Englishman, of whose fidelity he was the more 
confident because he was a good farmer, and because he could 
not speak French. 

3 From a treatise on worms by William Ramesey, physician in 
ordinary to Charles II., which contains some very direct hints of 
the modern germ-theory of disease. — J. R. L. 



THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 75 

the Grecian models. This may have been partially, 
but was it entirely true? Were those elements of 
the human mind which tease it with the longing for 
perfection in literary workmanship peculiar to the 
Greeks ? Before the new birth of letters, Dante 
(though the general scheme of his great poem be 
rather mechanical than organic) had given proof of a 
style, which, where it is best, is so parsimonious in the 
number of its words, so golclenly sufficient in the value 
of them, that we must go back to Tacitus for a com- 
parison, and perhaps not even to him for a parallel. 
But Dante was a great genius, and language curtsies 
to its natural kings. I will take a humbler instance, 
the Chant-fable of " Aucassin and Nicolete," 1 rip- 
pling into song, and subsiding from it unconsciously 
as a brook. Leaving out the episode of the King of 
Torelore, evidently thrust in for the groundlings, what 
is there like it for that unpremeditated charm which 
is beyond the reach of literary artifice and perhaps 
does not survive the early maidenhood of language ? 
If this be not style, then there is something better 
than style. And is there anything so like the best 
epigrams of Meleager 2 in grace of natural feeling, in 
the fine tact which says all and leaves it said unblurred 
by afterthought, as some little snatches of song by 
nameless French minstrels of five centuries ago ? 

It is instructive that, only fifty years after Du 
Bellay wrote the passage I have quoted, Bishop Hall 3 

1 A French romance of the thirteenth century, which Saints- 
bury calls "the finest prose tale of the French Middle Ages." 

2 A Greek epigrammatist of the first century B. c, famous 
for his purity of style and the beauty of his versification. 

3 Joseph Hall, bishop of Exeter, and later of Norwich, author 
of controversial writings and Satires. 



76 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

was indirectly praising Sidney for having learned in 
France and brought back with him to England that 
very specialty of culture which we are told can only 
be got in ancient Greece or, at Second hand, in ancient 
Rome. Speaking of some nameless rhymer, he says 
of him that 

" He knows the grace of that new elegance 

Which sweet Philisides 1 fetched late from France." 

And did not Spenser (whose earliest essay in verse 
seems to have been translated from Da Bellay) form 
himself on French and Italian models? Did not 
Chaucer and Gower, the shapers of our tongue, draw 
from the same sources? Does not Higgins tell us 
in the " Mirrour for Magistrates " that Buckhurst, 
Phaer, Tuberville, Golding, and Gascoygne imitated 
Marot ? Did not Montaigne prompt Bacon to his 
Essays and Browne (unconsciously and indirectly, it 
may be) to his " Religio Medici " ? Did not Skelton 
borrow his so-called Skeltonian measure from France ? 
Is not the verse of " Paradise Lost " moulded on that 
of the " Divina Commedia " ? Did not Dryden's 
prose and Pope's verse profit by Parisian example ? 
Nay, in our own time, is it not whispered that more 
than one of our masters of style in English, and they, 
too, among the chief apostles of classic culture, owe 
more of this mastery to Paris than to Athens or Rome ? 
I am not going to renew the Battle of the Books, 2 nor 

1 The name of a shepherd in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. 
In a Pastoral JEglogue upon the death of Sir Philip Sidney, pub- 
lished in 1596, and attributed to Sir Edward Dyer, a company 
of shepherds take up the lament in turn, each beginning, " Phi- 
lisides is dead." 

2 The Battle of the Books was written by Dean Swift to sup- 
port his patron, Sir William Temple, in the famous Boyle and 



THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 11 

would I be understood as questioning the rightful 
place so long held by ancient and especially by Greek 
literature as an element of culture and that the most 
fruitful. But I hold this evening a brief for the 
Modern Languages, and am bound to put their case 
in as fair a light as I conscientiously can. Your kind- 
ness has put me in a position where I am forced to re- 
consider my opinions and to discover, if I can, how 
far prejudice and tradition have had a hand in form- 
ing them. . 

I will not say with the Emperor Charles V. that a 
man is as many men as he knows languages, and still 
less with Lord Burleigh that such polyglottism is but 
" to have one meat served in divers dishes." But I 
think that to know the literature of another language, 
whether dead or living matters not, gives us the prime 
benefits of foreign travel. It relieves us from what 
Richard Lassels 1 aptly calls a " moral Excommunica- 
tion ; " it greatly widens the mind's range of view, 
and therefore of comparison, thus strengthening the 
judicial faculty ; and it teaches us to consider the re- 
lations of things to each other and to some general 
scheme rather than to ourselves ; above all, it enlarges 
aesthetic charity. It has seemed to me also that a 
foreign language, quite as much as a dead one, has 
the advantage of putting whatever is written in it at 
just such a distance as is needed for a proper mental 
perspective. No doubt this strangeness, this novelty, 
adds much to the pleasure we feel in reading the liter- 

Bentley controversy, which originated in the violently contested 
question of the relative superiority of ancient and modern litera- 
ture. 

1 An English Catholic priest and author of the seventeenth 
century. 



1/ 



78 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

ature of other languages than our own. It plays the 
part of poet for us by putting familiar things in an 
unaccustomed way so deftly that we feel as if we had 
gained another sense and had ourselves a share in the 
sorcery that is practised on us. The words of our 
mother-tongue have been worn smooth by so often 
rubbing against our lips or minds, while the alien 
word has all the subtle emphasis and beauty of some 
new-minted coin of ancient Syracuse. In our critical 
estimates we should be on our guard against this 
charm. 

In reading such books as chiefly deserve to be read 
in any foreign language, it is wise to translate con- 
sciously and in words as we read. There is no such 
help to a fuller mastery of our vernacular. It com- 
pels us to such a choosing and testing, to so nice a 
discrimination of sound, propriety, position, and shade 
of meaning, that we now first learn the secret of the 
words we have been using or misusing all our lives, 
and are gradually made aware that to set forth even 
the plainest matter, as it should be set forth, is not 
only a very difficult thing, calling for thought and 
practice, but an affair of conscience as well. Translat- 
ing teaches us as nothing else can, not only that there 
is a best way, but that it is the only way. Those who 
have tried it know too well how easy it is to grasp the 
verbal meaning of a sentence or of a verse. That is 
the bird in the hand. The real meaning, the soul of 
it, that which makes it literature and not jargon, that 
is the bird in the bush which tantalizes and stimulates 
with the vanishing glimpses we catch of it as it flits 
from one to another lurking-place, — 

" Et fugit ad saliees et se eupit ante videri." 1 

1 And flies to the willows, yet wishes first to be seen. Virgil, 
Eclogue 3, 1. 65. 



THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 79 

After all, I am driven back to my Virgil again, 
you see, for the happiest expression of what I was 
trying to say. It was these shy allurements and 
provocations of Omar Khayyam's Persian which led 
Fitzgerald to many a peerless phrase and made an 
original poet of him in the very act of translating. I 
cite this instance merely by way of hint that as a spur 
to the mind, as an open-sesame to the treasures of our 
native vocabulary, the study of a living language 
(for literary, not linguistic, ends) may serve as well 
as that of any which we rather inaptly call dead. 

We are told that perfection of form can be learned 
only of the Greeks, and it is certainly true that many 
among them attained to, or developed out of some 
hereditary germ of aptitude, a sense of proportion 
and of the helpful relation of parts to the whole or- 
ganism which other races mostly grope after in vain. 
Spenser, in the enthusiasm of his new Platonism, tells 
us that " Soul is form, and doth the body make," and 
no doubt this is true of the highest artistic genius. 
Form without soul, the most obsequious observance 
of the unities, the most perfect a priori adjustment of 
parts, is a lifeless thing, like those machines of per- 
petual motion admirable in every way but one — that 
they will not go. I believe that I understand and 
value form as much as I should, but I also believe 
that some of those who have insisted most strongly on 
its supreme worth as the shaping soul of a work of art 
have imprisoned the word " soul " in a single one of 
its many meanings and the soul itself in a single one 
of its many functions. For the soul is not only that 
which gives form, but that which gives life, the mys- 
terious and pervasive essence always in itself beauti- 
ful, not always so in the shapes which it informs, but 



80 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

even then full of infinite suggestion. In literature it 
is what we call genius, an insoluble ingredient which 
kindles, lights, inspires, and transmits impulsion to 
other minds, wakens energies in them hitherto latent, 
and makes them startlingly aware that they too may 
be parts of the controlling purpose of the world. A 
book may be great in other ways than as a lesson in 
form, and it may be for other qualities that it is most 
precious to us. Is it nothing, then, to have conversed 
with genius ? Goethe's " Iphigenie " is far more per- 
fect in form than his " Faust," which is indeed but a 
succession of scenes strung together on a thread of 
moral or dramatic purpose, yet it is " Faust " that we 
read and hold dear alike for its meaning and for the 
delight it gives us. And if we talk of classics ; what, 
then, is a classic, if it be not a book that forever 
delights, inspires, and surprises, — in which, and in 
ourselves, by its help, we make new discoveries every 
day ? What book has so warmly embosomed itself 
in the mind and memory of men as the Iliad ? And 
yet surely not by its perfection in form so much as by 
the stately simplicity of its style, by its pathetic truth 
to nature, for so loose and discursive is its plan as to 
have supplied plausible argument for a diversity of 
authorship. What work of classic antiquity has given 
the branded as he would have called it, to more fruit- 
ful thinking than the Essays of Montaigne, the most 
planless of men who ever looked before and after, a 
chaos indeed, but a chaos swarming with germs of 
evolution ? There have been men of genius, like 
Emerson, richly seminative for other minds ; like 
Browning, full of wholesome ferment for other minds, 

1 Old French = impulse. Related to French branler, to stir, 
to move. • 



THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 81 

though wholly destitute of any proper sense of form. 
Yet perhaps those portions of their writings where 
their genius has precipitated itself in perfect, if de- 
tached and unrelated crystals, flashing back the light 
of our common day tinged with the diviner hue of 
their own nature, are and will continue to be a more 
precious and fecund possession of mankind than many 
works more praiseworthy as wholes, but in which the 
vitality is less abounding, or seems so because more 
evenly distributed and therefore less capable of giving 
that electric shock which thrills through every fibre 
of the soul. 

But Samuel Daniel, an Elizabethan poet less valued 
now than many an inferior man, has said something 
to my purpose far better than I could have said it. 
Nor is he a suspicious witness, for he is himself a mas- 
ter of style. He had studied the art of writing, and 
his diction has accordingly been less obscured by time 
than that of most of his contemporaries. He knew 
his classics, too, and his dullest work is the tragedy of 
" Cleopatra " shaped on a classic model, presumably 
Seneca, certainly not the best. But he had modern 
instincts and a conviction that the later generations 
of men had also their rights, among others that of 
speaking their minds in such forms as were most con- 
genial to them. In answer to some one who had de- 
nounced the use of rhyme as barbarous, he wrote his 
" Defence of Rhyme," a monument of noble and yet 
impassioned prose. In this he says, " Suffer the 
world to enjoy that which it knows and what it likes, 
seeing whatsoever form of words doth move delight, 
and sway the affections of men, in what Scythian 1 sort 

1 As the Scythians were a nomadic people, the adjective de- 
notes lack of culture and refinement. 



82 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

soever it be disposed and uttered, that is true number, 
measure, eloquence, and the perfection of speech." I 
think that Daniel's instinct guided him to a half- 
truth, which he as usual believed to include the other 
half also. For I have observed that truth is the only 
object of man's ardent pursuit of which every one is 
convinced that he, and he alone, has got the whole. 

I am not sure that Form, which is the artistic sense 
of decorum controlling the coordination of parts and 
ensuring their harmonious subservience to a common 
end, can be learned at all, whether of the Greeks or 
elsewhere. I am not sure that even Style (a lower 
form of the same faculty or quality, whichever it be), 
which has to do with the perfection of the parts them- 
selves, and whose triumph it is to produce the greatest 
effect with the least possible expenditure of material, 
— I am not sure that even this can be taught in any 
school. If Sterne had been asked where he got that 
style which, when he lets it alone, is as perfect as 
any that I know, if Goldsmith had been asked where 
he got his, so equable, so easy without being unduly 
familiar, might they not have answered with the 
maiden in the ballad, — 

" I gat it in mymither's wame, 
Where ye '11 get never the like " ? 

But even though the susceptibility of art must be 
inborn, yet skill in the practical application of it to 
use may be increased, — best by practice, and very 
far next best by example. Assuming, however, that 
either Form or Style is to be had without the inter- 
vention of our good fairy, we can get them, or at least 
a wholesome misgiving that they exist and are of 
serious import, from the French, as Sir Philip Sidney 
and so many others have done, as not a few are doing 



THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 83 

now. It is for other and greater virtues that I would 
frequent the Greeks. 

Browning, in the preface to his translation of the 
" Agamemnon," says bluntly, as is his wont, " learn- 
ing Greek teaches Greek and nothing else." One is 
sometimes tempted to think that it teaches some other 
language far harder than Greek when one tries to read 
his translation. Matthew Arnold, on the other hand, 
was never weary of insisting that the grand style 
could be best learned of the Greeks, if not of them 
only. I think it may be taught, or, at least, fruitfully 
suggested, in other ways. Thirty odd years ago I 
brought home with me from Nuremberg photographs 
of Peter Fischer's statuettes of the twelve apostles. 
These I used to show to my pupils and ask for a 
guess at their size. The invariable answer was 
" larger than life." They were really about eighteen 
inches high, and this grandiose effect was wrought by 
simplicity of treatment, dignity of pose, a large un- 
fretted sweep of drapery. This object-lesson I found 
more telling than much argument and exhortation. 
I am glad that Arnold should have been so insistent, 
he said so many admirable things in maintaining his 
thesis. But I question the validity of single verses, 
or even of three or four, as examples of style, whether 
grand or other, and I think he would have made an 
opponent very uncomfortable who should have ven- 
tured to discuss Homer with as little knowledge of 
Greek as he himself apparently had of Old French 
when he commented on the "Chanson de Roland." 
He cites a passage from the poem and gives in a note 
an English version of it which is translated, not from 
the original, but from the French rendering by Genin, 
who was himself on no very intimate terms with the 



84 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

archaisms of his mother-tongue. "With what he says 
of the poem I have little fault to find. It is said with 
his usual urbane discretion and marked by his usual 
steadiness of insight. But I must protest when he 
quotes four lines, apt as they are for his purpose, as 
an adequate sample, and then compares them with a 
most musically pathetic passage from Homer. Who 
is there that could escape undiminished from such a 
comparison ? Nor do I think that he appreciated as 
he should one quality of the poem which is essentially 
Homeric : I mean its invigorating energy, the exhila- 
ration of manhood and courage that exhales from it, 
the same that Sidney felt in " Chevy Chase." 2 I be- 
lieve we should judge a book rather by its total effect 
than by the adequacy of special parts, and is not 
this effect moral as well as aesthetic ? If we speak of 
style, surely that is like good breeding, not fortuitous, 
but characteristic, the key which gives the pitch of 
the whole tune. If I should set some of the epithets 
with which Achilles lays Agamemnon about the ears 
in the first book of the Iliad in contrast with the dis- 
pute between Roland and Oliver about blowing the 
olifaunt, 2 I am not sure that Homer would win the 
prize of higher breeding. Or shall I cite Hecuba's 

rov iyot fxiaov r]7rap e^ot/At 
ia-Oifxevac 7rpoo-</>vcra ? 3 

The " Chanson de Roland " is to me a very interest- 

1 Sir Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poesie, says, "I never 
heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my 
heart moved more than with a trumpet." 

2 Written also olifant. The horn or bugle of Roland. It 
was of ivory, and the legend ascribes to it a much more ringing 
sound than to any other horn. 

8 " Whose inmost vitals I were fain to fasten and feed upon." 



THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 85 

ing and inspiring poem, certainly not to be named 
with the Iliad for purely literary charm, but equipped 
with the same moral qualities that have made that 
poem dearer to mankind than any other. When I 
am "moved more than with a trumpet," I care not 
greatly whether it be blown by Greek or Norman 
breath. 

And this brings me back to the application of what 
I quoted just now from Daniel. There seems to be a 
tendency of late to value literature and even poetry 
for their usefulness as courses of moral philosophy or 
metaphysics, or as exercises to put and keep the men- 
tal muscles in training. Perhaps the highest praise 
of a book is that it sets us thinking, but surely the 
next highest praise is that it ransoms us from thought. 
Milton tells us that he thought Spenser " a better 
teacher than Scotus or Aquinas," 1 but did he prize 
him less that he lectured in a garden of Alcina ? 2 To 
give pleasure merely is one, and not the lowest, func- 
tion of whatever deserves to be called literature. 
Culture, which means the opening and refining of the 
faculties, is an excellent thing, perhaps the best, but 
there are other things to be had of the Muses which 
are also good in their kind. Refined pleasure is refin- 
ing pleasure too, and teaches something in her way, 
though she be no proper schooldame. In my weaker 
moments I revert with a sigh, half deprecation, half 
relief, to the old notion of literature as holiday, as 

" The world's sweet inn from care and wearisome turmoil." 

1 Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, famous teachers of the- 
ology in the thirteenth century. 

2 Alcina was a fairy, the embodiment of carnal delights, who 
figures in Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato and Ariosto's Orlando 
Furioso. 



86 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

Shall I make the ignominious confession that I relish 
Skelton's " Philip Sparowe," 1 pet of Skelton's Mais- 
tres Jane, or parts of it, inferior though it be in form, 
almost as much as that more fortunate pet of Lesbia ? 
There is a wonderful joy in it to chase away ennui, 
though it may not thrill our intellectual sensibility 
like its Latin prototype. 

And in this mood the Modern Languages add largely 
to our resources. It may be wrong to be happy un- 
less in the grand style, but it is perilously agreeable. 
And shall we say that the literature of the last three 
centuries is incompetent to put a healthy strain upon 
the more strenuous faculties of the mind? That it 
does not appeal to and satisfy the mind's loftier de- 
sires ? That Dante, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon, 
Shakespeare, Cervantes, Pascal, Calderon, Lessing, 
and he of Weimar in whom Carlyle and so many 
others have found their University, — that none of 
these set our thinking gear in motion to as good pur- 
pose as any ancient of them all ? Is it less instructive 
to study the growth of modern ideas than of ancient ? 
Is the awakening of the modern world to conscious- 
ness and its first tentative, then fuller, then rapturous 
expression of it, like 

— " the new-abashed nightingale 
That stinteth first when she beginneth sing," 

" Till the fledged notes at length forsake their nests, 
Fluttering in wanton shoals," 

less interesting or less instructive to us because it 
finds a readier way to our sympathy through a pos- 
tern which we cannot help leaving sometimes on the 

1 John Skelton wrote an elaborate lament, some forty pages 
in length, for a pet sparrow. Its Latin prototype was the poem 
which Catullus wrote on the death of Lesbia's bird. 



THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 87 

latch, than through the ceremonious portal of classical 
prescription? Goethe went to the root of the matter 
when he said, " people are always talking of the study 
of the ancients ; yet what does this mean but apply 
yourself to the actual world and seek to express it, 
since this is what the ancients also did when they 
were alive ? " That " when they were alive " has an 
unconscious sarcasm in it. I am not ashamed to con- 
fess that the first stammerings of our English speech 
have a pathetic charm for me which I miss in the 
wiser and ampler utterances of a tongue, not only 
foreign to me as modern languages are foreign, but 
thickened in its more delicate articulations by the 
palsying touch of Time. And from the native wood- 
notes of many modern lands, from what it was once 
the fashion to call the rude beginnings of their litera- 
ture, my fancy carries away, I think, something as pre- 
cious as Greek or Latin could have made it. Where 
shall I find the piteous and irreparable poverty of the 
parvenu so poignantly typified as in the " Lai de 
l'Oiselet " ? Where the secret password of all poetry 
with so haunting a memory as in " Count Arnaldos," — 

" Yo no digo esta cancion 
Sino a quien conmigo va " ? 1 

It is always wise to eliminate the personal equation 
from our judgments of literature as of other things 
that nearly concern us. But what is so subtle, so elu- 
sive, so inapprehensible as this folle du logis ? 2 Are 
we to be suspicious of a book's good character in pro- 
portion as it appeals more vividly to our own private 
consciousness and experience ? How are we to know 

1 1 do not sing this song except to those who go along with 
me. 

2 Imagination. 



88 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

to* how many it may be making the same appeal ? Is 
there no resource, then, but to go back humbly to the 
old quod semiier, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus} 
and to accept nothing as orthodox literature on which 
the elder centuries have not laid their consecrating 
hands ? The truth is, perhaps, that in reading ancient 
literature many elements of false judgment, partly 
involved in the personal equation, are inoperative, or 
seem to be so, which, when we read a more nearly 
neighboring literature, it is wellnigh impossible to 
neutralize. Did not a part of Matthew Arnold's pre- 
ference for the verses of Homer, with the thunder-roll 
of which he sent poor old Thuroldus 2 about his busi- 
ness, spring from a secret persuasion of their more 
noble harmony, their more ear-bewitching canorous- 
ness ? And yet he no doubt recited those verses in a 
fashion which would have disqualified them as barbar- 
ously for the ear of an ancient Greek as if they had 
been borrowed of Thuroldus himself. Do we not see 
here the personal fallacy's eartip ? I fancy if we could 
call up the old jongleur and bid him sing to us, 
accompanied by his vielle, we should find in his verses 
a plaintive and not unimpressive melody such as so 
strangely moves one in the untutored song of the Tus- 
can peasant heard afar across the sun-steeped fields 
with its prolonged fondling of the assonants. There is 
no question about what is supreme in literature. The 
difference between what is best and what is next best 
is immense ; it is felt instinctively ; it is a difference 

1 What always, what everywhere, what by all [has been ap- 
proved]. 

2 Thuroldus (written also Turoldus, Turold, and The'roulde) 
is a name appended to one of the manuscripts of the Chanson de 
Roland, but it is uncertain whether it indicates the author or 
only a copyist, or a minstrel. 



THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 89 

not of degree but of kind. And yet may we not with- 
out lese-majesty say of books what Ferdinand says of 
women, — 

" for several virtues 
Have I liked several women ; never any 
With so full soul but some defect in her 
Did quarrel with the noblest grace she owed 
And put it to the f oil " ? * 

In growing old one grows less fanatically punctual 
in the practice of those austerities of taste which 
make too constant demands on our self-denial. The 
ages have made up their minds about the ancients. 
While they are doing it about the moderns (and they 
are sometimes a little long about it, having the whole 
of time before them), may we not allow ourselves to 
take an honest pleasure in literature far from the 
highest, if you will, in point of form, not so far in 
point of substance, if it comply more kindly with our 
mood or quicken it with oppugnancy according to our 
need ? There are books in all modern languages 
which fulfil these conditions as perfectly as any, how- 
ever sacred by their antiquity, can do. Were the men 
of the Middle Ages so altogether wrong in preferring 
Ovid because his sentiment was more in touch with 
their own, so that he seemed more neighborly ? Or 
the earlier dramatists in overestimating Seneca for the 
same reason ? Whether it be from natural predisposi- 
tion or from some occult influence of the time, there 
are men who find in the literature of modern Europe 
a stimulus and a satisfaction which Athens and Rome 
deny them. If these books do not give so keen an 
intellectual delight as the more consummate art and 
more musical voice of Athens enabled her to give, 
yet they establish and maintain, I am more than half 
1 See The Tempest, Act III., Scene 1. 



90 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

willing to believe, more intimate and confiding rela- 
tions with us. They open new views, they liberalize 
us as only an acquaintance with the infinite diversity 
of men's minds and judgments can do, they stimulate 
to thought or tease the fancy with suggestion, and in 
short do fairly well whatever a good book is expected 
to do, what ancient literature did at the Revival of 
Learning, with an effect like that which the reading 
of Chapman's Homer had upon Keats. 1 And we must 
not forget that the best result of this study of the 
ancients was the begetting of the moderns, though 
Dante somehow contrived to get born with no help 
from the Greek Hera and little more from the Roman 
Lucina. " 'Tis an unjust way of compute," says Sir 
Thomas Browne, " to magnify a weak head for some 
Latin abilities, and to undervalue a solid judgment 
because he knows not the genealogy of Hector." 

As implements of education, the modern books have 
some advantages of their own. I am told, and I be- 
lieve, that there is a considerable number of not unin- 
genuous youths, who, whether from natural inaptitude 
or want of hereditary predisposition, are honestly 
bored by Greek and Latin, and who yet would take a 
wholesome and vivifying interest in what was nearer 
to their habitual modes of thought and association. 
I would not take this for granted, I would give the 
horse a chance at the ancient springs before I came 
to the conclusion that he would not drink. No doubt, 
the greater difficulty of the ancient languages is be- 
lieved by many to be a prime recommendation of them 
as challenging the more strenuous qualities of the 
mind. I think there are grounds for this belief, and 
was accordingly pleased to learn the other day that 
1 See Keats 's On first looking into Chapman's Homer. 



THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 91 

my eldest grandson was taking kindly to his Homer. 
I had rather he should choose Greek than any modern 
tongue, and I say this as a hint that I am making 
allowance for the personal equation. The wise gods 
have put difficulty between man and everything that 
is worth having. But where the mind is of softer 
fibre, and less eager of emprise, may it not be prudent 
to open and make easy every avenue that leads to lit- 
erature, even though it may not directly lead to those 
summits that tax the mind and muscle only to reward 
the climber at last with the repose of a more ethereal 
air? 

May we not conclude that modern literature, and 
the modern languages as the way to it, should have a 
more important place assigned to them in our courses 
of instruction, assigned to them moreover as equals in 
dignity, except so far as age may justly add to it, and 
no longer to be made to feel themselves inferior by 
being put below the salt ? That must depend on the 
way they are taught, and this on the competence and 
conscience of those who teach them. Already a very 
great advance has been made. The modern languages 
have nothing more of which to complain. There are 
nearly as many professors and assistants employed in 
teaching them at Harvard now as there were students 
of them when I was in college. Students did I say ? 
I meant boys who consented to spend an hour with 
the professor three times a week for the express pur- 
pose of evading study. Some of us learned so much 
that we could say " How do you do ? " in several lan- 
guages, and we learned little more. The real impedi- 
ment was that we were kept forever in the elementary 
stage, that we could look forward to no literature that 
would have given significance to the languages and 



92 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

made them beneficent. It is very different now, and 
with the number of teachers the number of students 
has more than proportionally increased. And the 
reason is not far to seek. The study has been made 
more serious, more thorough, and therefore more in- 
spiring. And it is getting to be understood that as 
a training of the faculties, the comparative philology, 
at least, of the modern languages may be made as ser- 
viceable as that of the ancient. The classical super- 
stitions of the English race made them especially be- 
hindhand in this direction, and it was long our shame 
that we must go to the Germans to be taught the 
rudiments of our mother-tongue. This is no longer 
true. Anglo-Saxon, Gothic, Old High and Middle 
High German and Icelandic are all taught, not only 
here, but in all our chief centres of learning. When 
I first became interested in Old French I made a sur- 
prising discovery. If the books which I took from 
the College Library had been bound with gilt or 
yellow edges, those edges stuck together as, when so 
ornamented, they are wont to do till the leaves have 
been turned. No one had ever opened those books 
before. 

" I was the first that ever burst 
Into that silent sea." 1 

Old French is now one of the regular courses of in- 
struction, and not only is the language taught, but its 
literature as well. Remembering what I remember, 
it seems to me a wonderful thing that I should have 
lived to see a poem in Old French edited by a young 
American scholar (present here this evening) and 

1 We were the first that ever burst 
Into that silent sea. 

Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner. 



THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 93 

printed in the journal of this Society, a journal in 
every way creditable to the scholarship of the coun- 
try. Nor, as an illustration of the same advance in 
another language, should we forget Dr. Fay's admirable 
Concordance of the " Divina Commedia." But a more 
gratifying illustration than any is the existence and 
fruitful activity of this Association itself, and this 
select concourse before me which brings scholars to- 
gether from all parts of the land, to stimulate them 
by personal commerce with men of kindred pursuits, 
and to unite so many scattered energies in a single 
force controlled by a common and invigorated pur- 
pose. 

We have every reason to congratulate ourselves on 
the progress the modern languages have made as well 
in academic as in popular consideration. They are 
now taught (as they could not formerly be taught) in 
a way that demands toil and thought of the student, 
as Greek and Latin, and they only, used to be taught, 
and they also open the way to higher intellectual joys, 
to pastures new and not the worse for being so, as 
Greek and Latin, and they only, used to do. Surely 
many-sidedness is the very essence of culture, and it 
matters less what a man learns than how he learns 
it. The day will come, nay, it is dawning already, 
when it will be understood that the masterpieces of 
whatever language are not to be classed by an arbi- 
trary standard, but stand on the same level in virtue 
of being masterpieces ; that thought, imagination, and 
fancy may make even a patois acceptable to scholars ; 
that the poets of all climes and of all ages " sing to 
one clear harp in divers tones ; " and that the masters 
of prose and the masters of verse in all tongues teach 
the same lesson and exact the same fee. 



94 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

I began by saying that I had no wish to renew the 
Battle of the Books. I cannot bring myself to look 
upon the literatures of the ancient and modern worlds 
as antagonists, but rather as friendly rivals in the effort 
to tear as many as may be from the barbarizing plu- 
tolatry which seems to be so rapidly supplanting the 
worship of what alone is lovely and enduring. No, 
they are not antagonists, but by their points of dis- 
parity, of likeness, or contrast, they can be best under- 
stood, perhaps understood only through each other. 
The scholar must have them both, but may not he who 
has not leisure to be a scholar find profit even in the 
lesser of the two, if that only be attainable ? Have 
I admitted that one is the lesser ? O matre pulchra 
filia pulchrior 1 is perhaps what I should say here. 

If I did not rejoice in the wonderful advance made 
in the comparative philology of the modern languages, 
I should not have the face to be standing here. But 
neither should I if I shrank from saying what I be- 
lieved to be the truth, whether here or elsewhere. I 
think that the purely linguistic side in the teaching 
of them seems in the way to get more than its fitting 
share. I insist only that in our college courses this 
should be a separate study, and that, good as it is in 
itself, it should, in the scheme of general instruction, 
be restrained to its own function as the guide to some- 
thing better. And that something better is Litera- 
ture. Let us rescue ourselves from what Milton calls 
" these grammatic flats and shallows." The blossoms 
of language have certainly as much value as its roots ; 
for if the roots secrete food and thereby transmit life 
to the plant, yet the joyous consummation of that life 
is in the blossoms, which alone bear the seeds that 
1 O more beautiful daughter of a beautiful mother. 



THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 95 

distribute and renew it in other growths. Exercise is 
good for the muscles of mind and to keep it well in 
hand for work, but the true end of Culture is to give 
it play, a thing quite as needful. 

What I would urge, therefore, is that no invidious 
distinction should be made between the Old Learning 
and the New, but that students, due regard being had 
to their temperaments and faculties, should be encour- 
aged to take the course in modern languages as being 
quite as good in point of mental discipline as any 
other, if pursued with the same thoroughness and to 
the same end. And that end is Literature, for there 
language first attains to a full consciousness of its 
powers and to the delighted exercise of them. Litera- 
ture has escaped that doom of Shinar which made our 
Association possible, and still everywhere speaks in 
the universal tongue of civilized man. And it is only 
through this record of Man's joys and sorrows, of his 
aspirations and failures, of his thought, his specula- 
tion, and his dreams, that we can become complete 
men, and learn both what he is and what he may be, 
for it is the unconscious autobiography of mankind. 
And has no page been added to it since the last an- 
cient classic author laid down his pen ? 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

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